Hurricane Bernard: power head gone bad

Bernardhny · Aug 22, 2014

Funny thing happened to my tank last night. I was doing my normal maintenance routine and at the end decided to add a new powerhead. The one I picked attached itself with a very substantial locking suction cup. I positioned it to send a river of water through a channel in my aquascape and started her up. The new flow was awesome and it was putting current in the perfect spot. The fish would sit outside the current, pop in and fight there flow and pop out. It was looking like a nice fun game. After a few hours I went to bed. I had happy dreams.

Then when I woke up and got ready to leave I went to check out the tank. Sand everywhere. Fish lying on their sides as and four inches of deep sand bed was pushed from one side of the tank to the next. Everything buried. Even the leather coral that is at the top of the tank had an inch of sand on it.

The powerhead fell and created a hurricane in my tank. Coral toppled over, a plate coral was completely buried. NOTHING where it should have been.

I cleaned off all the rock and coral the best I could but tonight I will have to aquascape again.

Lesson learned: no suction cup powerheads. Only magnetically coupled ones (like I have always used).

Oh the frustration. Oh and I did make sure the glass was clean and it was secure b4 going to sleep.

Texas Reefer · Aug 22, 2014

Oh my gosh, that sounds HORRIBLE! I hope the fishies are OK!

Daniel@R2R · Aug 22, 2014

Yep! That's why I only get ones that have magnets now. I lived that experience too many times.

CBurgei · Aug 22, 2014

I just recently changed my suction cup power heads for the ones with the magnets. I have seen the ones with the suction cups in my tank drop before but I always stacked empty rocks next to the so when they dropped they would lang on the rocks. I will never use power heads with suction cups again, not even if someone gave them to me for free. I needed new ones anyways because the old power heads were not creating enough current/circulation for the tank. I love to watch my fish play in the current that is created in the tank and do not want a sand hurricane.