RonSF
11/16/2004, 12:04 AM
I just had a horrific event happen that I feel compelled to tell everyone about caused by the operation of my ReefKeeper.
I got a call from my wife this afternoon around 3:15 saying that my tank was 56ºF and the chiller was still running. No fish were in sight and all my coral was enveloped in mucus and shriveled looking. I had her immediately unplug the chiller and take a look at the heater in the sump to see if it was running. The heater was shattered, presumably from trying to turn on when the water was outrageously cold.
She started running a bucket brigade of 4 cup measuring cups from the tank to the microwave, heating one at a time and pouring them back in the tank. I had another glass heater in the garage in a trash can curing new live rock, but I was afraid that it would shatter as well unless the water was much warmer, so she did about 3 hours of tireless water heating to try to save whatever she could.
It is now a little over 4 hours later and I am home now with a new titanium heater (duh, what was I thinking with glass) and a fresh bag of carbon in the sump. The tank is up to 73.8ºF now and astoundingly, most of my fish look as if they are going to make it. My softies are still tight little balls except for my colt which looks OK already. There are a few bare spots on a M.Danae that look like tissue loss, but crazy as it sounds, the majority of my SPS still have fairly normal coloration, albeit under a layer of heavy mucus. The water is still very cloudy, for obvious reasons.
When she arrived home and began tank CPR there were no fish in sight. She said that most of them gradually came out of the rock and laid around on the sandbed or on rocks. Some, including my flame angel were upside down and motionless at times. My Friedmani is still unaccounted for, but the rest of the fish are looking somewhat normal, if lethargic.
The reason I feel compelled to share this incident here is that my ReefKeeper seems to have triggered it. I made a tactical error that made it possible, which others can fairly easily avoid. I placed my chiller on Channel 5, who's default function is powerhead. At some point today after we left for work this morning, the ReefKeeper reset itself to it's defaults. My heater was on Channel 6, which also defaults to powerhead function, so it was useless as a counter to the errant chiller. I don't know if a power outage triggered this, but the battery backup failed if this is the case. I don't really know if the chiller was being cycled on and off with a wavemaker cycle, but it was obviously on often enough (if not continuously) to bring the temperature to Northern California temperatures.
Whatever the technical cause of the problem, it could have been avoided by me using the same functions assigned by DA. I had no good reason to reassign the Channels. I just changed them because I could. Although I'm sure that this will make no difference under most circumstances (my problem may be a design glitch or just a one in a million malfunction), why take a chance? If you are using other, less mission critical devices it wouldn't be catastrophic. Use a ReefKeeper for a heater and it will almost certainly have a failsafe of it's own high temperature shutoff. Use a ReefKeeper for a chiller that lacks it's own temperature controller and it could spell a disaster like mine. Keep it plugged into Channel 3 JUST IN CASE.
Believe it or not, I will still use my ReefKeeper for my new tank. I know that Nick and Co. will sort this out and hopefully put a warning in the new User Guides at some point about unregulated chillers on alternate channels. I obviously wish I had done things differently in my case, although I could have easily been a lot less lucky with the outcome. I'll know a lot more about my tank's fate in the next day or two and keep you posted. . .
-Ron
I got a call from my wife this afternoon around 3:15 saying that my tank was 56ºF and the chiller was still running. No fish were in sight and all my coral was enveloped in mucus and shriveled looking. I had her immediately unplug the chiller and take a look at the heater in the sump to see if it was running. The heater was shattered, presumably from trying to turn on when the water was outrageously cold.
She started running a bucket brigade of 4 cup measuring cups from the tank to the microwave, heating one at a time and pouring them back in the tank. I had another glass heater in the garage in a trash can curing new live rock, but I was afraid that it would shatter as well unless the water was much warmer, so she did about 3 hours of tireless water heating to try to save whatever she could.
It is now a little over 4 hours later and I am home now with a new titanium heater (duh, what was I thinking with glass) and a fresh bag of carbon in the sump. The tank is up to 73.8ºF now and astoundingly, most of my fish look as if they are going to make it. My softies are still tight little balls except for my colt which looks OK already. There are a few bare spots on a M.Danae that look like tissue loss, but crazy as it sounds, the majority of my SPS still have fairly normal coloration, albeit under a layer of heavy mucus. The water is still very cloudy, for obvious reasons.
When she arrived home and began tank CPR there were no fish in sight. She said that most of them gradually came out of the rock and laid around on the sandbed or on rocks. Some, including my flame angel were upside down and motionless at times. My Friedmani is still unaccounted for, but the rest of the fish are looking somewhat normal, if lethargic.
The reason I feel compelled to share this incident here is that my ReefKeeper seems to have triggered it. I made a tactical error that made it possible, which others can fairly easily avoid. I placed my chiller on Channel 5, who's default function is powerhead. At some point today after we left for work this morning, the ReefKeeper reset itself to it's defaults. My heater was on Channel 6, which also defaults to powerhead function, so it was useless as a counter to the errant chiller. I don't know if a power outage triggered this, but the battery backup failed if this is the case. I don't really know if the chiller was being cycled on and off with a wavemaker cycle, but it was obviously on often enough (if not continuously) to bring the temperature to Northern California temperatures.
Whatever the technical cause of the problem, it could have been avoided by me using the same functions assigned by DA. I had no good reason to reassign the Channels. I just changed them because I could. Although I'm sure that this will make no difference under most circumstances (my problem may be a design glitch or just a one in a million malfunction), why take a chance? If you are using other, less mission critical devices it wouldn't be catastrophic. Use a ReefKeeper for a heater and it will almost certainly have a failsafe of it's own high temperature shutoff. Use a ReefKeeper for a chiller that lacks it's own temperature controller and it could spell a disaster like mine. Keep it plugged into Channel 3 JUST IN CASE.
Believe it or not, I will still use my ReefKeeper for my new tank. I know that Nick and Co. will sort this out and hopefully put a warning in the new User Guides at some point about unregulated chillers on alternate channels. I obviously wish I had done things differently in my case, although I could have easily been a lot less lucky with the outcome. I'll know a lot more about my tank's fate in the next day or two and keep you posted. . .
-Ron