Stray voltage bleached my coral in 24hrs

[jeff427]

I woke up in the morning to feed my tank (as I do every morning) and to my shock all my red/purple caps had turned to a light pink and the green caps nearly all white. All the LPS seemed fine and every fish accounted for. At first I blamed my T5 lights malfunctioning and shifting color spectrum but when I shut them down and looked at the coral with just room light it was clear the T5 wasn't the issue, they were clearly bleached like i had never seen before. I am fortunate to have a controller that logs PH and Temp so I checked the logs to see if there was some crazy swing in the night, I found nothing out of the normal for the night or the previous three days of logs (temp steady at 78.8 and ph 8.1-8.2). I tested water parameters with every test kit I had 3 times over that morning (salinity 1.024, alk 8, ca 440, mg 1400, ph 8.1, ammonia 0, nitrite 0, nitrate 0) with no surprises. This went on for another two days and the SPS just got worse and worse to the point that it seemed a total loss, with the exception of the LPS, this baffled me. I refused to do a massive water change because now I wanted to know if what was wrong was a constant. This afternoon afterwork I went to the LFS and purchased two additional caps (since they were most affected) to see how they would react to my tank. When I went to put the new coral in my tank I noticed the male end of the DC plug to my moon light had come undone from the light and was fully submerged in the return area of my tank. The night before I woke up to find bleached corals I was dorking with the wires in the back of my tank and must have pulled the moon light adapter loose. The DC adapter wasnt corroded much, a little scale so i am not really worried about heavy metals at this point. Long story short I am still not going to do a water change, I want to see how these new caps fare. Just wanted to share my experience with a stupid little mistake that hit me in the pocket book pretty good. Maybe it wasn't the voltage that did me in but at this pointI don't have any other smoking guns.

Ill post back how things go with the new corals.

 

[redfishbluefish]

So that I understand, the DC side of the moonlight wiring was in the water. If that is the case, you’re talking 12 to 24 volts DC, with relatively low amperage. I doubt very much if this was the cause. However, if you thing you have AC voltage leak, check using a multimeter/VOM.



You mention T5’s…..did you recently switch to T5’s. I also didn’t understand you comments about seeing your corals with room light, and commenting that it was not the T5’s causing the problem.


Bottom line, I think you have something else going on.

 

[jeff427]

You are correct that it was the DC side of the moon light, 12vdc adapter 900 ma if I recall correctly. The T5's are not new, nothing really has changed (that I know of) other than that DC side plug dropping into the water. Ill check tonight for stray AC voltage. What I meant by ruling out the T5 was that I had thought maybe one of the bulbs had shifted in color and was misleading my eye as to the true color of the coral. I turned off the T5 lights and looked at the coral with just the white light of the room the tank is in, what I saw was bleached corals as I did under the T5. So far I haven't changed anything in the tank (that i have control over) since the event other than removing the DC plug, time will tell with the new coral to see how they respond. I was honestly considering setting up a test with a biocube and some caps and once stable and showing growth dropping in the DC side of the same plug to see what might happen.... then I decided there are many more fun ways to burn cash money.