Dats All Folks - Lost them all ***Post #79 explained***
- Thread starter vanimate
- Start date
Good to hear you are still keeping some fish. It's hard losing fish that are near impossible to replace. When my ST died I was very close to selling off my fish and packing my tank with 2000 tetras but I eventually felt better and continue to keep my monsters
Mate that is rough to say the least. Such a sad loss.First I'd like to thank each of you for all of your kind words and condolences. My brothers and sisters here can truly understand better than non-fishkeepers of what a loss like this means. So I TRULY appreciate the support, It really does help. I know alot you have gone through the same thing and hopefully none of you will ever have to.
I know you have all been waiting for an explanation and I apologize it's taken me so long to write this as I still cannot really believe it happened. So on to how this all happened. It's actually quite simple really. On Friday morning, I went downstairs to feed my fish as I do every morning. I frequently check the level in the sumps and I saw it was a little low, so I grabbed my python and put it in the sump and turned on the hot and cold water and got it to around 75.(I can come pretty close just by guessing). I don't really take the temp of the water when I top off the sump like I do during WC's because adding 5-10 gallons into 240 gallons is pretty negligible temperaturewise. I than started to feed the other tanks in the back room (the same room) while it was filling. I must have done this hundreds of times before. But for some reason on this particular Friday morning, I walked away from my fish, for the last time.
Now we all know that the hot water doesn't reach its hottest temperature in the first few minutes of being on. You can get a pretty good guess if you plan on running it for just a couple of minutes. It's a different when it runs for nine hours. So you can probably guess, the temp just kept getting hotter and hotter, all the while the pump just kept pumping it from the sump into the tank. This is what ultimately caused the demise of my fish.
When I got home that night, I went into the basement and noticed the humidity and immediately realized that something might be going on. I looked into my 150 in the main room and it looked ok. As I walked the short hallway into the back, I could kind of make out something floating in the big tank but wasn't sure. As I walked on, my socks immediately became wet. As I approached the tank, I realized there was no movement which is the opposite reaction I usually get with begging dats. At this point I still didn't realize that I had left the water running into the sump.The floating objects were dead fish. Than after staring into the tank for a minute, I remembered what I had started the morning earlier.
Apparently, the hot water was up way higher than the cold water. I measured the temp of the water after wards and it was right up at 100 degrees. I had a 75 gallon hot water heater put in so I had plenty of hot water to do water changes, but in this case it was detrimental. The weird thing is that the siphon on the overflow was broken, so Water was running off the top of the tank. I've never had the siphon broken because I have a pump to suck out the air in the top of my overflow. If the overflow was working it could have diluted the hot water being pumped in. Or if I had just turned the cold water a little higher or the hot a little lower. Or if ... But it does not matter now. What is done is done.
A couple people have asked if I lost power. Funny thing is that we just had a big blizzard here in Chicago about a month ago, where I did lose power for 12 hours, didn't lose a single fish, not even the tig which I thought for sure wasn't going to survive in oxygen poor still water.
It still doesn't seem real to me that all my fish are gone.It took me literally years and years and $,$$$ to acquire this collection (doing pickups at 2am and at all hours at O'Hare and Midway cargo being shipped from Florida, Washington D.C. and I forget where else, you all know how that goes). Raising some of these guys from little fish. I will miss these guys immensely. Right now the tank sits empty and it is the saddest looking tank I have ever seen. Since getting widebars is nearly impossible,and I am not rich, I cannot replace the collection that I had built and I don't know what will eventually go in there. I'm guessing it will sit empty for awhile, but It will be filled with life again soon.
Thanks again to everyone, it's great to have a community of good people like yourselves in times like these.
We all done things wrong in the hobby at times and kick ourselves for it. Like you say what is done is done. Need a damn time machine in life sometimes lol but that not been invented yet.
Thanks for having the time and courage to share your misfortune and I wish you all the best in what ever you decide to do.
You will come back, we all do. Even if it takes years to rebuild stock. That's what life is for, searching and acquiring the things that make us happy.
Jim
