Seems there has been a increase of “ this happened and it’s midnight so no one is open what do I do “ posts mainly over equipment issues so I thought I would start a post wil a list of equipment I personally recommend always having a spare of. I also thought we could all share a story on our own mishaps that are the reason why we/you keep a spare of a specific part now.
Personally I keep :
2 spare 500 watt heaters as they will fit in any of my tanks.
2 spare powerheads 1 - 1350 Hydors old one from a tank take down but work
4 Battery powered cheap air pumps Incase I lost power in a storm.
2 Spare T5 bulbs and a T5 fixture I bought off amazon strictly for a back up light so the cheapest I could find.
Sadly back in 1999 I learned the hard way to keep the spare parts I do all due to my ex-wife’s cat :mad:
We went out of town for a few days and returned late on a Friday night to find her cat chewed up the power cords to the powerheads, heater, and lights at some point. The tank was at approximately 70* most the fish were ok but the corals looked awful. In the small town we lived in there was nothing open till Monday and the nearest one open on a weekend was 2 hours away. No petco’s back then.
I did one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done in 22 years of reef keeping that night. Seeing I had zero spare parts I turn the water faucet on hot and started to make buckets of hot water. Yep you guessed it! I poured that hot water from old copper water pipes right into my tank thinking I was doing something to save my tank. Within a hour that 300 gallon tank had about 50% of the good water removed and 150 gallons of untreated hot water from our boiler dumped into the tank.
I sit back looking at my tank saying to myself well now what am I going to do about water movement and lights
At this time my ex says what is that god awful smell? I look at our fish to see most are now dead others dieing and corals melting away. Our water had high levels of Ammonia, Chlorine, and lord knows what else in it and I knew it which is why I always bought water from my lfs then as they had filters that I as well as most in the early to mid 90’s couldn’t afford back then.
There’s nothing worse then a tank crash when it’s your foolish choices that caused the damage.
Lessons learned :
NEVER use hot tap water and keep a spare heater and Never use tap water from a old house with a boiler and copper pipes that can’t be filtered with a ro/di unit and has zero TDS in today’s standard. If I had a spare heater the tank would have heated back up slowly and safely. Most if not all my fish would have survived and possibly my corals too.
If I would have had a heater I still had nothing to creat water movement, now I keep spares. If you do upgrades with pumps / powerheads etc. seriously think about keeping at least one for a back up. As things can and do fail.
If I had a spare heater and powerheads I still was without lights for a few more days. You don’t have to keep anything fancy just something that would provide a bit of proper lighting is better then nothing at all.
Never get married to a woman with a cat! Just joking or am I
I hope my story on one of my biggest tank failures explains why I now keep what I do for spare parts/equipment.
I know there’s plenty of opps stories out there let’s share them!
One of these stories I’m sure will help out those that don’t want to ask the one dumb question. Well I say the only thing dumb about a dumb question is the thought that it’s dumb! Be the brave one and ask what others a scared to!
Let’s all share a story about what spares you keep and why you now keep them!
