melev

Today's wordy blog is about Sunday's power outage. We had a rainy weekend, but nothing that would suggest power would go out. About 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning, everything went dead. As usual, I was awake but winding down. UPS' were chirping, the Vortech pumps were providing flow from their battery backups, and I lit a couple of candles and filed a report with the power company. The recorded message was that power would be restored at 6:30 a.m. so I took a nap.

Around that promised time, the reef sprang to life and I heard water and air belch into the 400g which awakened me. Checking on the reef, the Apex screen was dead. I tried to hard cycle the Apex by unplugging it for 60 seconds, but that didn't bring it back to life. No Apex, no way to check the water temperature. With only about 2 hours of unrestful sleep, I was in no mood to deal with it and within a couple more minutes the power went out again. Ugh!

Since the Vortechs were still going and the house's ambient temperature was still comfortable, I decided to get a couple more hours sleep. By 9:30 am the computer UPS was flat-lining, with a single tone wailing to my annoyance. It was nearly 10:00 a.m. and still no juice. I opened the garage door and began to task of setting up the generator so the reef would have full power, not to mention my coffee maker. The neighbor next door was working on something in his garage, so I checked to see if he had power on the off chance that my home was having specific issues but he too complained that he needed power.

The generator hasn't been used in about seven months, and the garage has been reorganized in a way that it was a pain to get out. The good news is within 60 seconds of completing the necessary steps (turn off main 50 amp breaker to fish room; connect power cord to sub panel; turn on generator) the power come on at 10:00 a.m.

And even better, the Apex came back to life as if nothing had happened. Temperature was 75.1° F - about three degrees cooler than usual. The heaters came on and I plugged in a fourth one. Within an hour or so, the water temperature rose to normal levels. Had I run the generator it never would have dipped down.

All those UP arrows means the heaters are on.

The reef didn't seem to skip a beat by the temporary outage.

Still, I felt exhausted all day thereafter. Worrying about your reef can do that to you.