worst night of my life
 

so im sitting at home after my christmas party when i see a huge flash come out of my tank!!! my heater blew up and zapped all my fish corals clams etc. so i spent the next hour taking my dead pets out of my tank. dont know if ill have the heart to start over again :(

Oh geez that's terrible!! I'm sorry to hear that! What kind of heater? Did it show any signs of trouble before this happened?

Ah dude! sorry to hear it, start over start over...i know it's hard but do it...if you need to take a break (maybe go after the heater manufacturer) would the liverock etc be ok still?

again sorry to hear it bud, losing everything is rough, i only had a little tank i lost once but it took me a long time to want to do it again, but i couldn't get the bug outta me, just laid dormant for half a year, maybe fellow canreefers can donate some frags etc to your cause...i would but i have no frags only one coral so far.

it sucks i feel helpless im sitting here watching everything die and flushing fish as they go boooooo to aquarium heaters

nope it has worked good for about two years its an aquarium system 200 watt heater.im going to try and get a pic up tommorow it blew up in the middle

Hi,

Sorry to hear about your mishap. If you do decide to start over again. Give me a call and I'll see if I can help you get you back on your feet again.

Good luck with the recovery.

Paul|Reef Addictions|778-552-5673|reefaddictions@telus.net

I've got a couple questions for you if you feel up to it.

The "best practice" discussion on this topic is usually full of theory and conjecture so I bet we'd all like to know more about your setup.

Did you have the tank on a GFCI plug?

Did you have a ground probe?

I'm not really sure either of these devices could have completely avoided this but I'm curious if you used them. Sorry to hear about it, I'd be pretty upset if I were you.

i got 3 powerbars set up 2 have surge protection 1 did not guess which one the heather was pluged into. there might be a little hope i seen a crab moving around in there so maybe everything is not dead

Seems like crabs are indestructible!

Sorry for your losses, Steve :cry: What a terrible blow just before Christmas :sad:

One thing I have learned about heaters after reading lots of horror stories about them is to replace them every couple of years whether it looks like they need it or not.

I had a heater do that a couple years ago. I too had procrastinated at installing the GFCI outlet, but I did have a grounding probe. There was a heck of a mess in the sump, lots of black scum and a horrible burnt smell. I did a big water change and ran a ton of carbon in it afterwards. I was fortunate to have no losses. Got the GFCI installed the next day and replaced the heaters in both tanks with titanium ones.