Eric23
Active Member
Long post but I think will help some people. The short of this is that I had stray voltage.
I recently moved to a new house and brought my reefer 450 with me. I paid some local people to help with the move and it went pretty smooth. I only lost 1 fish, a small leopard wrasse. About 3 weeks after the move I went on vacation for a week which I've done in the past with no tank issues so I wasn't to worried as I had everything set. When I came back all my fish looked really bad and the next day they were all dead all at once. I lost a purple tang, hippo tang that I had raised from a dime sized baby, a 7 year old percula, algae blenny, and a 2 year old swallow tail angel. At the same time a lot of my corals started to look like crap, I lost whatever frags of sps I had, some other stuff started to close up, my tank just didn't look good. Water testing didn't reveal much of anything, my parameters we're all good. The only thing I could think was that after we moved in we had a lot of work going on and maybe something got into the tank and poisoned everything so I started aggressively running carbon and doing more water changes. I was heartbroken to the point where I didn't even want to go into the room where the tank was and getting really frustrated that I couldn't get things looking better no matter what I did. Flash forward a month, my tank is fishless and all that's left are my inverts, anemones, softies, zoa's, and gorgonian. I put my hands in the tank and I feel a familiar tingle. I'm an electrician and I know what it feels like to be shocked. I go grab my meter, one end to ground, one in the tank, and holy crap I have 34 volts. One by one I start unplugging things and I watch the voltage go down. It turns out the sicce pump in my new eshopps skimmer, my new pair of maxspect gyres, and my varios return pump, are all giving off stray voltage. I've had tanks for years and never installed a ground probe. If I had I may have saved hundreds if not thousands in fish and coral. I went to my local shop, got a 10 dollar ground probe, put it in, and boom my meter reads 0 volts, intake it out 34 volts, put it back in 0 volts again. I'm really happy that I finally figured out the reason for what happened to but really frustrated with myself for not having a probe in the first place. So if you're having unexplained problems or long term live stock suddenly start showing signs of disease or stress that you can't figure out, I suggest going to you're local hardware store and buying a cheap multi meter to see if you have stray voltage. Better yet everyone should just have a ground probe on every tank.
I recently moved to a new house and brought my reefer 450 with me. I paid some local people to help with the move and it went pretty smooth. I only lost 1 fish, a small leopard wrasse. About 3 weeks after the move I went on vacation for a week which I've done in the past with no tank issues so I wasn't to worried as I had everything set. When I came back all my fish looked really bad and the next day they were all dead all at once. I lost a purple tang, hippo tang that I had raised from a dime sized baby, a 7 year old percula, algae blenny, and a 2 year old swallow tail angel. At the same time a lot of my corals started to look like crap, I lost whatever frags of sps I had, some other stuff started to close up, my tank just didn't look good. Water testing didn't reveal much of anything, my parameters we're all good. The only thing I could think was that after we moved in we had a lot of work going on and maybe something got into the tank and poisoned everything so I started aggressively running carbon and doing more water changes. I was heartbroken to the point where I didn't even want to go into the room where the tank was and getting really frustrated that I couldn't get things looking better no matter what I did. Flash forward a month, my tank is fishless and all that's left are my inverts, anemones, softies, zoa's, and gorgonian. I put my hands in the tank and I feel a familiar tingle. I'm an electrician and I know what it feels like to be shocked. I go grab my meter, one end to ground, one in the tank, and holy crap I have 34 volts. One by one I start unplugging things and I watch the voltage go down. It turns out the sicce pump in my new eshopps skimmer, my new pair of maxspect gyres, and my varios return pump, are all giving off stray voltage. I've had tanks for years and never installed a ground probe. If I had I may have saved hundreds if not thousands in fish and coral. I went to my local shop, got a 10 dollar ground probe, put it in, and boom my meter reads 0 volts, intake it out 34 volts, put it back in 0 volts again. I'm really happy that I finally figured out the reason for what happened to but really frustrated with myself for not having a probe in the first place. So if you're having unexplained problems or long term live stock suddenly start showing signs of disease or stress that you can't figure out, I suggest going to you're local hardware store and buying a cheap multi meter to see if you have stray voltage. Better yet everyone should just have a ground probe on every tank.
