Disaster Avoided

What do you do after realizing you have just dodged a reef bullet? Some take an aspirin. Some visit the bathroom. I went to my liquor cabinet, which is just a shelf under my kitchen sink, and poured myself a tall glass of Napoleon Brandy. Boy I needed it.

So what happened? Guys and girls, please read this post as it will save you from a disaster.

For those who have their skimmers in their sumps and don’t have a mod on their collection cup, skip this post as it doesn’t pertain to you. For the rest… buckle up.

So I found a great way to dump my skimmate from the collection cup by modifying my skimmer. All I did was reinforce the bottom of the cup, drilled a hole and tapped with with a HP fitting. Plumbed a 1/8″ HPF hose into it, and on the back end, attached a valve for control. As the new vat settled in, my skimmate improved and didn’t need to keep the valve closed. Without any worry, the valve was fully open and the skimmate was fairly dry. That was until this morning.

As I walked in to do my regular fish feeding, I noticed a wet floor. That is usually not a good sign unless you were washing it. And I wasn’t. I took some precautions when I was setting up the vat. I placed all of my electrical above ground, and believe me, thank God that I did. The floor was wet all around the vat, where the electrical usually is. I hope this opens some eyes, as you should never leave any electrical above or under your fish tank. My rule of thumb is 3-5 feet away from your tank.

Back to the situation at hand. As I trailed the source of the water, I realized that my 5 gallon waste collection bucket was full of water… clear water. I immediately knew what had happened and opened the valve on the skimmer (that’s the other mod that I have). This allowed me to lower the water level in the skimmer’s neck. I ran to check what the salinity read in the vat….. 1.021. HUH?!? Holy $h!T!! Don’t worry, my salinity was 1.023 to begin with. A 0.002 change in salinity is pushing the threshold of susceptible levels. I caught it in the nick of time. Absolutely nothing seems to be affected by this event.

To bring the salinity up to standards, I will add small batches of salt over a period of a week.  Don’t want to do anything to quickly as it will have negative effects on the whole system.

You don’t think that this can happen to you? Have you heard of OregonReef? Have you heard how it crashed? Read on.

It can happen to just about anyone with that similar skimmer setup.  For the novices, keep your skimmers INSIDE the sump. And if you do one of those skimmer cup mods, get a gate/ball valve for it, or else you will end up like the formerly gorgeous OregonReef.