Never a dull moment in Reefland!

[Lance]

I get up this morning and come downstairs looking forward to my Sunday morning cup of Timmy's. Instead I hear the unpleasant sound of a powerhead sucking air. The water level in the 90g is down 3" and the MP20 is sucking half air/half water. The Foxface is hysterical, dashing about crashing into everything, and all other fishes are in hiding. Poccillipora colony is half exposed to the air and covered in slime. The sump is, of course, 90% full and the skimmer is overflowing everywhere! FML!
For whatever reason, the return pump (Mag 950) has failed. I unplug the skimmer and the pump, run to the garage to grab the back-up pump, (old faithful Sedra KSP 7000), put in on-line and plug it in. Nothing! WTF! I take the pump out and plug it into a wall socket and away it goes. Hmmmm? I plug it back into the powerbar: nothing! The skimmer, two dosing pumps, and refugium lights are all plugged into the same powerbar and they're all working. So I plug the pump into a different outlet on the powerbar and away it goes. One outlet on the 6 outlet PB is dead. Weird! Never seen that before.
So I do a 25g water change, replace the carbon, blow the slime off the corals, clean the skimmer and plug it back in. It doesn't go on! Grrrrrrrrrr!!! Take it apart, clean it all up, plug it in again and it still doesn't go on. I'm about 2 seconds away from getting a large hammer and smashing all of this electronic crap into teeny weenie pieces! Calm Down. Step Away. Go get your coffee. And that's where I am at the moment, having my coffee, while I vent on Canreef. Sometimes I think more tank problems are caused from faulty, crappy equipment than anything else.