Power outage during cycling

elementJ · Mar 4, 2018

Hi all, I’ve had a little bit of a hiccup in starting my tank. I finally decided to set up my tank after waiting nearly two years [emoji849], got it up and running and am using Red Sea Pro mature reef to cycle it. Three weeks down the road, things are going well since I started with “dead rock” instead of live I’m about a week behind what the program says.

Anyways, along comes this storm this weekend and knocks my power out for almost 2 days. Tank temp drops down to 59 and there’s absolutely no circulation. I wasn’t too concerned with it considering I don’t have any livestock that could die. So my question is this, with the temperature dropping so low and no circulation would it have hindered the cycle or killed off bacteria?

My levels were abnormally high (from what they had been before) once the power did come on so I did about a 10% water change. Not sure if this was the right thing to do?

Sorry if this is a really dumb question but I couldn’t really find anything online to answer my questions!

Crabs McJones · Mar 4, 2018

elementJ said:
Hi all, I’ve had a little bit of a hiccup in starting my tank. I finally decided to set up my tank after waiting nearly two years [emoji849], got it up and running and am using Red Sea Pro mature reef to cycle it. Three weeks down the road, things are going well since I started with “dead rock” instead of live I’m about a week behind what the program says.

Anyways, along comes this storm this weekend and knocks my power out for almost 2 days. Tank temp drops down to 59 and there’s absolutely no circulation. I wasn’t too concerned with it considering I don’t have any livestock that could die. So my question is this, with the temperature dropping so low and no circulation would it have hindered the cycle or killed off bacteria?

My levels were abnormally high (from what they had been before) once the power did come on so I did about a 10% water change. Not sure if this was the right thing to do?

Sorry if this is a really dumb question but I couldn’t really find anything online to answer my questions!

Best way to tell is to test your levels. 59 is pretty cold and with that you will have had bacteria die off. But hopefully not a lot.

mjlash22 · Mar 4, 2018

Power outages are not fun! Red Sea's mature pro kit is pretty finicky, as they make you follow a strict guide/schedule. Test your levels and go from there. I may recommend that even as a safety net, get a bottle of Bio-Spira and add that to supplement.

Not saying that you haven't already, but you may want to come up with a power outage plan. Generator/back up batteries, etc...If it happened once, it's sure to happen again unfortunately.