Fear of leaving your tank

[Gumbies R Us]

School is about to start back for a lot of families, which means squeezing out one more vacation trip. However, with vacation time, means leaving the tank alone for a week. I am wondering how do you alleviate the fear of leaving your tank alone. Do you have someone who watches over your tank, or is everything in autopilot mode? Share those tips here! Photo Credit: @SkiCatTX

 

[randomfishdude]

When hureacane byeyl or whatever came through a few weeks ago. We were supposed to be going in a cruse the day before it hit. That's been my biggest fear is having to leave the tank during a hurricane. Idk what will happen I'm assuming the canal water if it managed to get that high would surely kill everything along with being without power... we were lucky tho and the hurricane barely even hit. Not much more than a sprinkle... and I got a nice diving trip on the cruse.

 

[GARRIGA]

Fish can go without eating a week. Brute 20 or larger can serve as a temporary ATO to avoid salinity creep and that can be reduced further by adding a plastic top to slow evaporation. Turn the heater off by disconnecting from the wall. Raise house temps to 75. All will be alright and oxygen levels will rise. Goal being reduction of what can go wrong.

Something I plan on doing which don't seem discussed is turning dosers off and bring my levels high enough over the coming weeks so that they aren't too low on return. Seems based on others that having 14 dkh and calcium 550 with mag 3x calcium hasn't caused catastrophic failure and also seen where having these levels drop to 5 and 350, respectively have been survived assuming change was slow.

Last I want is something going wrong and additives dumped at an alarming rate or thermostat going off. Can't trust family to follow directions. Can't trust Murphy to not happen.

Could also keep lights off for a week to slow consumption of nutrients. Storms could darken the skies for a week or longer. Perhaps dim the lights down to half intensity. Corals have seen worse in transit from seas far away and fish won't care. Inverts likely clueless. Key is slowing life down as if in brumation and preventing the worse from happening. Which means turn that skimmer off too. Last one needs is wife returning to a house that smells like Fulton Street on a hot summer day.

 

[Reefer Matt]

I don’t leave for more than three days, if ever. There is no way I can rely on someone to maintain all five tanks while I am gone, as there aren’t any Reefers around me. So no vacations.

 

[revhtree]

I like to use a lot of cameras, auto control and having emergency back up friends ready to help!

 

[Borat]

It looks like most reefers are not very religious...

 

[saltytanked]

Auto pilot for a week is no big deal, do it often and don’t even feed fish.

Heavily feed the week leading up to leaving, absolutely no water changes, absolutely no adjustments to anything. The day of leaving, empty skimmer cup, clean glass full up ato, one last heavy feeding and I’m out….

 

[CO2TLEY]

Apex and cameras

 

[PharmrJohn]

When I went on a week long vacation 15 years ago, I had my niece look after the tank. She basically stayed at my house. Had everything pre-dosed and ready to be fed to the tank. Also, a trashcan full of RODI H2O for top offs. She did a fabulous job. In addition to that with my next build, I'll add a camera and have the local LFS come over and make sure all is well. I also had an overflow for my skimmer contents, so she didn't have to worry about that.

 

[BubblesandSqueak]

just had a power failure yesterday for 2 hours. UPS ran the lights and pump on the Biocube32 for over 2 hours and the large IM112 just runs the pump for 2.5 hours. when the UPS battery drains out, the air stones will come on afterwards. I happened to be home so I just ran the portable generator for an hour. wifi is connected to UPS that runs for over 3 hours so I have a camera on the workings for that duration.

 

[randomfishdude]

It looks like most reefers are not very religious...

?

 

[vlangel]

For me, I simplified my tank so less can go wrong.
1. I covered most of the display and sump so there is less evaporation. So if I use the ATO, it only has a 1 gallon reservoir in case it fails (and dumps it all in the tank). That is enough for more than a week.
2. I use cheap Penn Plax battery backup pumps for aeration in both display and sump. I also have aeration going into the display from 2 different circuits in case 1 trips.
3. I keep easy fish and coral that can live on flake food for a few weeks and have an Eheim auto flake feeder.

As an aquarium tech, the 2 things that I saw that caused tank crashes was loss of oxygen (due to outage or tripped circuit) and ATO that dumped lots of fresh water in a marine tank and salinity got too low.

 

[Borat]

?

I dont hear the suggestion to pray for the best

 

[LPS Bum]

If I'm going somewhere by myself, I have my wife and kids feed my fish every day. If we're all going somewhere, I have a neighbor come over to feed every other day. Either way, I pre-portion out all the food and label it, so there can be no overfeeding.

I fill up the ATOs and the kalk right before I leave, and the tanks are hooked up to battery backups. Past that, it's in God's hands.

 

[JamesZ.]

The point to a vacation is to be able to relax, not think too much, and enjoy it. Do yourself a favor and find an experienced qualified individual, pay them if you must, and enjoy your vacation worry free.

 

[Reeferbadness]

I am currently in Indonesia and have been away from my 2 x 200g tanks (3 and 5 years old) for 3 weeks. These types of trips used to drive me nuts. Now, i have a Trident to do water tests (Alk/Calc/Mag) can view my Reef Matt and ATO via the ReefBeat app and also have the Red Sea Doser connected to my Alk/Cal and Mag dosing - which i can change remotely as needed by Trident tests. I have a trained person feed the fish and other minor maintenance things daily + have a person come at 2 weeks to do a water change if gone for 3 weeks or longer and do spot tests if i sense things are not ok with Trident results. While lots of automation can lead to a false sense of security, this system lets me feel in control and on top of the most important things for my corals.

 

[Formulator]

Everything is pretty well automated and I can even keep tabs on things remotely through my apex, so I don’t sweat it much.

My dad lives in town and will stop by my house to feed the fish or make any adjustments. He’s not a reefer, but he is an engineer so follows my instructions to the tee and I don’t need to worry. I also take pictures of every valve and device so if there is a problem I can send him a picture marked up with circles and arrows to show him how to fix it for me.

 

[WhatCouldGoWrong71]

The wife and I were out of state for 2 weeks at the beginning of the year. MIL came and watched the kids and the tank. Disaster. There wasn't a button, doser, or thing that wasn't touched. Had to call my LFS to start coming to do disaster recovery. First trip he found a full AFS at the bottom of a tank. Some how it made it through my lid, magically. Sadly I was in the middle of treating for LCA. And, well, I had literal burger king cash register instructions to follow, I guess that how about 1000mil of MG went into the tank. Lot's of lessons learned on this trip.

Fast forward 3 months and I go out of the country by myself, not always able to connect to the internet (Asia). Had a good plan, plus the wife can get herself through a lot. She is a trooper. I dumbed a lot of things down on this trip, but my LFS was not far away. I had beaten LCA by this time and frankly, things were just chugging along. I did a big water change on my 130G system, that has lower nutrients, and I only do monthly changes in that tank. So that box was checked. The other tank does AWC and I had 2 months water on supply, and I put a spare MP40 in to keep the water moving, knowing I could trust that from not dying. The entire time I was gone it was pretty uneventful. Now I did tell her, and my LFS guy, DO NOT clean the glass. THIS is very KEY to this story. VERY. My LFS would grab a railroad spike if it were laying around to clean the glass and well my wife doesn't want to muck it up. So, I've always said, just leave the glass and I will deal with it when I get home. MISTAKE. BIG.

Apparently when I was "dumbing things down" I somehow changed the code on the AWC and it never once changed the water. Now, you may think this isn't a big deal. But, I guess for this tank it was. This tank runs high No3 and Po4. Like 30 and .25+. No water changes in nearly 25 days pushed the nutrients to Pluto. How did I discover this? Well, after I was home - I looked at both tank (never looked at the water station for levels in anything) I put my feet up and relaxed for the night with my wife. Get up in the am and start cleaning glass. First the big tank, man, everything looks incredible when you don't look at your stuff for 3-4 weeks. growth was incredible. Then, I go to the smaller tank with AWC in our bedroom. I start to clean the front panel and I notice that things look odd. This smaller tank is all acro, about 12 months old and starting to come into its own. As I get the first 6-10 inches down clean I can clearly see that 50% of the corals are do do brown. Some are already covered totally or mostly in coralline. Monti's look like a smash burger forgotten on the grill. Wound up losing about 20% of the coral. Did some huge water changes daily for a week. 30 days later everything was bouncing back very well with exception of the montis. Today their new growth looks fine, but you can see the scars of this.

So, going forward, I will just anticipate death and destruction for my return. This way I don't set my hopes up to far... lol

 

[piranhaman00]

My tank could go well over a month with neighbor stooping 2x per week.

I use 80 gallons of ATO.

 

[tigre44]

I have someone feed the fish but I use an ato for water replacement, my lights and chem addition are on timers. I still don’t like being away for more than a couple of weeks