Another data point and most likely the smoking gun....I sure hope it's the smoking gun but I want your thoughts.
Evidently a basic item that I overlooked in the building and creation of my tank was a grounding probe.
Today after a lengthy conversation at the LFS we felt confident we addressed any and all variables and were ready to send another canary (a single clown) in the coal mine. Well acclimation process was a "manual" drip 1.5oz/5min and it went well fish seemed to have 0 symptoms of anything...added him to the tank and he was doing fine for a while (2 hours or so) and then he seemed to be getting over run by the current....sent some videos to the LFS we decided pulling him and bringing him in was the best bet...after her observation she was commenting on how it seemed his back half was paralyzed and he couldn't move it and then she asked if I had a grounding probe....nope hadn't heard of it...***!
$15 amazon will have one here tomorrow
Here's what I don't get...multimeter from the ground to the water is testing at ~54v that seems crazy high to me for having my hand in there and not feeling it...I unplugged everything one at a time and watched the voltage drop....return pump -20v....heater -10v....etc
Additionally I bypassed the neptune thinking maybe that was the cause but no luck.
I agree that if you have one device popping breakers or has an obvious open contact/wire replace it....but this is everything; everything has some voltage leak into the system....will the ground probe solve this? Is it normal to have everything leak some voltage?
Super angry it might be a simple solution...but a plausible answer is nice
So - this issue comes up all of the time. Early on, stray voltage was blamed for head and lateral line erosion. Lots of grounding probes were sold, no benefit was seen, and studies proved that isn't an issue. However, stray voltage was easily measured in tanks and would go away when you added a ground, so the product seemed to work and they stayed in the market. More lately, stray voltage got blamed for any unknown fish death.
The trouble is, there are two types of "stray voltage". The first is what almost everyone sees - induced voltage due to some electrical component in the tank (often a pump). This does NOT harm the fish - the fish are not grounded so there is no electrical potential (current flow). Still, people didn't want to let go of the idea - the premise then shifted to the idea that this stray voltage causes some chronic, unidentified issues. That's also false.
The second issue is when there is an actual electrical fault in the tank, and current is going to ground. If you have a GFCI on your system, that will clamp down on it and stop the process. In tanks without a GFCI, current will still flow and this can be very dangerous to people. It also can cause changes in the seawater through electrolysis - I've always wondered if it turns sulfates into sulfides for example. This has *rarely* killed fish.
I still worry that there is an acclimation issue here. I searched through my files and found an article I had written on acclimation. I will post it to the library here later today, but here is an excerpt about drip acclimation:
Drip Acclimation
Setting up a line siphoning water from the main tank to an acclimation container is a common practice at many aquarium wholesale companies. These “acclimation tables” can assimilate huge numbers of fish into quarantine systems, dealing with high ammonia levels and other issues in assembly line fashion. Some home aquarists have attempted to emulate this in their home, but there are issues that must be addressed. First of all, the name “drip acclimation” is a misnomer. It should be termed “flow acclimation”, as the rate must be faster than a drip. If one were to set up a drip line at one drop of water per second (as many home aquarists have assumed would be an appropriate rate) it would take FIFTY hours to equilibrate the difference in water parameters between one liter of shipping water and the receiving tank to within 90% of each other! Obviously, the flow rate must be faster than that. A flow of one milliliter per second would result in one liter of shipping water reaching 90% equilibration in 2 1/2 hours
Aquarists must monitor the changing water chemistry values in the acclimation container throughout the process, and adjust the flow rate accordingly. One trick is to place a few drops of methylene blue liquid per gallon of water in the acclimation container. Not only does this have some antibiotic affect, and can help with oxygen transfer, as new water flows into the acclimation container, the aquarist can judge the amount of mixing by the dilution of the blue color over time.
Just as with regular acclimation methods, as the water quality values between the aquarium and the container get closer, the rate of change slows down, unless you increase the water mixing rate.
Flow acclimation systems may require adjunct aeration and heating to maintain better water quality in the acclimation container during the longer acclimation time. It also helps to use rectangular acclimation containers as the volume can be measured using a ruler (length in inches * width * depth of water / 231= gallons).
Jay
