My disaster, am i missing anything i should do

[watson_barrett]

Ok so three nights i was in my sump screwing with some stuff around 10-11pm....

The next day i left for work early in the am and didn't get home until around 6ish. As soon as i looked in the tank i knew something was seriously wrong. My tank is full of coral and about 1/4 of it was dying FAST...

I quickly noticed that my temp was up to 87.5!!!! Appearently when i was screwing with stuff in my sump i accidently pulled the temp monitor out of the water in the sump and it was hanging in the air. I keep my house around 70 so the thermo thought the water was cold and ran the heater all night and through the day. I quickly did a massive water change and go the temp down to 82.


Yesterday i had some more die off and i checked ammonia which was higher than normal but nothing to worry about, all the fish seem fine and are actually enjoying the fresh water w/ the changes.

Is there anything else i should be doing here. It looks like i'm going to loose a couple of my huge 12-14' colonies. I've already lost my prized 8' watermelon chalice, about 10 SPS colonies, frogspawn, 8' colt, favias, mooncoral to name a few : (

It is crazy how years of hard work can go down the drain with one stupid mistake.

[Playa-1]

Sorry to hear about your nightmare.

I don't know that there is anything you can do at this point other then to maintain proper water conditions and hoping for the best.

I think you might have been better off by slowly bringing the temp back into line. The quick massive water change might have done more damage then the temp itself.

I would suggest getting a Ranco temp controller or an Aquarium Controller to override heaters and lighting once the temp rises too much in the display. These devices can easily save you a small fortune and save the life of your pets as well.

I wish you luck with the remaining livestock.

[downhillbiker]

sorry to hear about the crash. i would say you cant do much else. you fixed the problem so it is only a matter of time before the corals come back to, and the ones that are left stop dying. hope everything works out. if you have corals that are going through major RTN, sometimes fragging the good part off will save whatever you frag. you may want to anyway, rather than have all this dead skeleton in your tank, thats what i did. seemed to help. my crash was last week, so i know where you are coming from.

[Shnabbles]

How have your inverts been acting... your snails, starfish, and stuff like that?

[Sk8r]

Carbon. Carbon, and change it after 4 days.
Watch your alk and ph, calcium.

Even Amquel if you can't get that ammonia to 0... corals tolerate Amquel better than they do Ammonia.

[9501gle]

I once did a water change with water that was to hot, its amazing how fast it killed my corals, this was early in my reefing days so didnt have to many to kill. I think a couple survived but were never the same. So sorry to hear of your loss.