8 hours of top off/flooding kills almost everything

nrosdal · #1 08-13-2012, 04:45 AM

in case anyone was wondering what would happen if your ato broke or like me you decided to manually top off your tank and forgot to turn it off overnight(because my float valve has been acting up and i wanted to be safe

).

the end result is a very wet floor and 90% of corals dead. the salinity went down to 1.009 and sat there for 8ish hours before i went down and found all the goodness. i have since brought it back to 1.02 ish and will slowly bring it back to normal from here over the next couple days.

it looks like a few things may survive, i am hoping that my carpet nem is one of them... it has mildly improved since bringing water back in reasonable range.

anyways, i just wanted to share my story and remind everyone once again to limit the amount of water available to your ato/fill valve.

i will post some pics over the next few days and show if anything recovers.

and maybe start posting in the fowlr forum for a while as most of the fish seem to have made it through

Flash · #2 08-13-2012, 04:57 AM

awww that sucks.... sorry buddy

SeaHorse_Fanatic · #3 08-13-2012, 05:34 AM

Ouch. That's why I use a 5g salt bucket for my top-up.

lpsreefer · #4 08-13-2012, 06:47 AM

It would be nice to have an ato with a built in salinity sensor. That way once the salinity drop to 1.024 the ato would turn off.

Mike-fish · #5 08-13-2012, 07:16 AM

I feel for you man I did that earlier this month too. Some of the zoos in that tank are coming back but so far none of the mushrooms have came back

all the fish seem to be rebounding nicely now I just have to contend with a cyno bloom. Keep positive that your corals will come back. My top off system as I use it for multiple tanks scattered around the house is simply a 1/4" line that I drag to the appropriate tank and open the valve and the ro unit turns on and stays on till I close the valve again. Simple but very risky we are retro fitting the system with a pair of solenoid valves rigged to a timer that will open them for a user set time period then close them after that amount of time. And to keep from relying on the valves to work to shut things down it will have a stand alone manualy cleared timer as well to make it hard to ignore/ forget about.