Power outage with a happy ending

SANND

SANND

Large Fish
#1
Jul 20, 2005
627
4
0
56
Washington, DC
#1
I recently lost power at my house for 7 days and thought I'd pass along my experience for other newbies to read.

The first thing I did was NOT panic. I live in a row house (brownstone to most of ya'll) and my tanks are in the middle of the house with little to no natural light. I decided against feeding so as not to foul the water up even more. I carefully did a 40% water change after the 3rd day and another 20% after the 5th day and then a 50% on the 7th night when we got power back.

Some really weird greyish stuff grew on the sand in the 20 gal and some weird white stuff on a piece in the 29 gal but all the other tanks were fine.

I only lost one fish, one of the smaller zebra danios that never seemed quite right. Another small zebra danio has been acting wonky since then and I'm not sure he's gonna make it but all in all I think things turned out pretty good considering what could have happened. :)
 

SANND

SANND

Large Fish
#3
Jul 20, 2005
627
4
0
56
Washington, DC
#3
It's still warm(ish) here and the tanks never went below 70F (about 20C) so temp was never a problem for me. If it had been winter I would've had a problem.

My other fish are:

1 ADF
1 Male Betta
3 Upside-down catfish
3 Clown loaches
1 Apple snail
1 Ramshead snail
10 Various adult danios
16 Baby longfin blue danios

All the larger danios and the catfish were hanging around the surface for air but the clown loaches and the really small baby danios (that don't seem to be growing btw) acted as if nothing was wrong. In fact, the loaches black strips never looked darker!
 

Charlius

Charlius

Medium Fish
#5
Sep 18, 2005
91
0
0
#5
What'd you do about your filter during this time?? W/o aerobic water running through the filter media, the bacteria would die. Is that what occurred making you go through a bit of a cycle?

Also, if you DO go through a long while like you did, w/o power, it's a good thing to wash the filter media. As said, no power=no water flow over the filter media. The "gunk" in the media will then become more and more toxic/deadly over time w/o the aerobic water. Then, when the power comes back on, the water flow will put this into the tank. Not good. Also, if this happens, I also heard it's good to throw the filter media into the tank, to help maintain the bacteria numbers.

Nice to hear you came out OK, though. Those water changes that you wisely did more than likely saved the lives of your fish. I live in Florida, and hurricane season is always a stressful time for me and the fish. If only there was a cheap way I could power the filter for a very prolonged period of time, but alas, there is no such way *sigh*.
 

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