What to do when your Reef Tank Crashes!

My tank isn’t performing that well. It’s completely crashing, and it’s a complete disaster. A opportunity to start all over again. My clownfish has been laying eggs every couple of weeks or so. Then they’re protecting them from the other fish, who are looking at them as food.

Engineers, like everyone else, make mistakes. Whatever it is, we neglect a vital aspect. When things are going well and everything is running smoothly, I believe we become a little too relaxed. We’ve let things slip that we probably shouldn’t have. We don’t test our water as frequently as we should; after all, the tank is in good shape.

If it starts to alter, we’ll notice. The issue is that things are constantly changing; you just can’t see them all of the time. Whatever you’ve been taught, every moving item in your aquarium, every LED, will eventually fail. Every day, every hour that an LED diode is turned on, it loses a fraction of its brightness. Dust collects on the bearings of the fans that cool your lights. The engine has to work harder to overcome the friction.

Plastic impellers degrade, magnets’ plastic coatings deteriorate, and they corrode in the water. Things take place. I grew too comfy in my tank and let everything run on autopilot for far too long. Now we’re seeing the result of that – a full-fledged tank crash.

At this stage, I’m focusing on the coral that has a chance of surviving rather than the coral that won’t.

It’s really depressing. What would I do in the situation? For millions of users, the app is crashing. Let’s put out a fast patch to fix it so it doesn’t crash. I discovered the corroding pump and took it out of the system.

To the water, I added copper and heavy metal absorption resins. I got a Triton ICP test today, and it came back with 0% copper. Or any other heavy metals that may have remained in my tank’s water. As a result, the app has ceased crashing. Our users are pleased, and they can now use the app again. Maybe the code is a lot messier behind the hood, but it works.

The next step for an engineering team may be to convene a meeting. A meeting that may be referred to as a Retro, Retrospective, or Root Cause Analysis. We’ll invite everyone who was engaged in the crash, including the code author. The QA personnel who assisted in the triage of the accident and the testing of the remedy. The team head or whoever signed off on the code, as well as those who worked on the repair.

The meeting’s purpose is not to apportion blame. It’s to discover out what caused the crash and to prevent it from happening again. So, except from me, there’s no one else in my tank. What happened to cause the crash?

Equipment maintenance practices that are far too lax. I would have noticed the wear if I had checked and cleaned the pumps more frequently. Alternatively, minor cracks in the plastic shell formed before the motor windings were fully exposed. So, now that we have a better understanding of how the crash occurred, we can move on to the next step. What can we do to avoid a repeat of this disaster? To run the multiple reactors and my chiller under my sump, I’m creating a new manifold. This will eliminate a few smaller pumps, making them unusable as a source of problems.

A ReeFlo pump will power the manifold, which will be located outside of my sump. Because the pump is external, it will be simpler to observe if something goes wrong with it.

It will also be easy to perform maintenance, such as turning off valves. The pump could easily removed by disconnecting two unions. These pumps are also incapable of leaking copper into the water. Water cannot contact copper motor windings because there is no way for it to do so. This does leave my return pump going, as well as the pump that runs my skimmer.

Vertex, the company that created both of these, is no longer in business. At this point, they’re like ticking timebombs/a>. The pumps are roughly 6 years old, which is the same age as my tank. I need to take care of these before they become a problem – for the time being, they appear to be fine. I’m considering using a second ReeFlo as a return pump. We’ve ruled out the possibility of a problem with the older Vertex pump. That leaves my skimmer, which is a challenge given the amount of room I have to deal with. It’s possible that I’ll have to keep a careful check on it. Instead of replacing it, I’m going to use one that’s fed from my manifold.

Before making any changes to my return pump, I’m going to wait and see how this manifold performs.

At a time, one project at a time! For starters, we’ll see how loud the pump is. ReeFlo pumps have a long track record of dependability. For as long as I’ve been in saltwater tanks, the firm has been producing them almost identical. That concludes the retro.

My sloppy equipment maintenance regimen was to blame for the crash. The solution is to reduce the number of pumps, make them more accessible, and make them easier to repair. As a result, I’m willing to do it more frequently. Similar workouts should be performed on your own tanks, in my opinion.

Or truly any time you’re dealing with a huge problem or shift, whether good or terrible. There’s always a reason for it, or a chain of events that lead up to it. There’s always something you can do to avoid or promote those events from occurring again.

So I hope this was of assistance! Phosphorus levels in the water are currently at an all-time high. Because phosphorus is find in all living cells, I believe this is the most likely source of it as things die.

Maybe this week, once I finish building my manifold. I’m thinking about hooking up a GFO reactor to help get it out of the water.