Worried about my tanks during power outage

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J

jadedreams

Gambusia
MFK Member
Jun 13, 2011
461
0
16
Oklahoma
Hey guys, we had lots of thunderstorms in the area last night and over a 100,000 people lost power just before midnight, including me. Power was still out this morning when I had to leave for work, I did do a partial water change in my larger tanks before I left and tried to "pour" the new water in to agitate it for some surface aeration.

Just worried about all my fish, have some very old silver dollars, large balas, frontosa, etc. Hate the thought of losing any of them and right now there's not much I can do since I'm at work for several more hours. Cross your fingers for me.. I'm hoping my power is back on when I get home and all my fish are doing ok.
 
I'll keep my fingers crossed. Keep us updated. I once lost power for four days a few years back. I keep the water levels down and ran a battery powered aerator. Luckily it was summer time then too.


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Buy a generator. If your gonna keep fish. This should be a part of your setup. Hurricane season will be here soon. It doesn't really affect you at your location but by September there is gonna be 100 of these threads. Look on Craigslist or eBay for a real small generator to handle your tanks in this situation. As for now, somehow keep water aerated and do small water changes
 
Best thing you can do is take the biological media out of the filters, rinse them off in tank water and then put them in a mesh bag in the tank. This will at least keep the bacteria alive while still consuming some of the ammonia that builds up. Another key (more relevant in the winter), is to wrap the tank in blankets or insulation to keep the temperatures up. I was without power for 5 days after Sandy and all my fish survived.
 
Thanks guys, I'll follow the bio media tip for my tanks when I get home from work. Sounds like it still may be a while for our power to come back on unfortunately. Been in this neighborhood for 10 years and never had power go off for more than an hour or so, really close to a hospital so they always got the power back on pretty fast in our area. But this outage is pretty big and unusual so the electric company is scrambling.
 
I would buy some battery powered bubblers.
 
Well I made it home from work and the power was back on thankfully. However I did have a few casualties, lost 4 african cichlids from my mixed mbuna tank, a couple convicts and one that broke my heart - my largest bala shark. Below is a pic of the bala, knew it was over a foot - looks like he was pushing 14". Going to miss this one, have 5 more large bala's but he was the biggest of the bunch.

My plan is to rinse the bio media from filters in tank water and do small water changes over the next several days to try to get everything back to what it should be. Any other suggestions since the power was out 12-18 hours ?

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