What is with the power tonight?

[DiverDude]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

Are your tank pumps on UPS? I was wondering about this myself. Didn't get a power failure down south but the lights were flickering all evening and the pumps were chattering a little on the bigger ones.

None of my tank stuff is on UPS. My computers, TV's and other sensitive electronics are.

I think you'll find that for what all but the smallest tank would draw, even a fair-sized UPS wouldn't last very long (guessing here, but for, say, a Maxijet1200 and a Koralia 2, maybe an hour ?). The real kicker is that when the power goes out, it's no big deal for a while; it's when it's STILL out 4 hours later that you need to worry. A UPS would kick-in right away and run mission-critical pumps for maybe an hour and then die. What you really need is something that knows when the power goes out and then waits an hour or
2 and then comes on, stabilizes things and then shuts off for a few hours and then repeats the process so things don't get too out of hand.

Of course, that assumes that you have prolonged power outages.

The other way to look at it -and this makes more sense in a city with reliable power, like Calgary- is that the UPS would keep things running for the duration of the outage (not lights and 'extras', but at least a circulation and maybe a skimmer) which would be optimal.