after spending 8 days away from my tank i come home to a huge mess i thought everything would be fine since i had more than enough water in my ATO to last the week and then some, had the person watching my dogs throw in a mysis cube every other day, and did a huge WC right before i left.... i left my skimmer off so i wouldnt have to worry about the pump stopping and than starting back and overflowing.... well on day 3 i get a call from my wife's uncle who was staying at our house to watch the zoo (dogs/cats/fish/bird) he says he thinks the lights havnt been on for the past few days! so i immediatly panic realizing that if the lights havnt been on the main power cord pobally got unplugged meaning all the pumps have been off aswell! my cats have gotten behind my tank a few times and yanked the plugs outta the wall so i have it all blocked off from top and sides so i have no idea how they got back there but thats besides the point.... i tried to walk him through everything on how to get everything hooked back up properly and for some reason after we got off the phone with him he took it upon himself to try and switch things around how he thought they should be so from there it made it very hard to explain things since everything was in a dj power strip plugged in to number switches but i still explained how important it was to have water movment and at that point i wasnt too concerned about the lights since i knew everything could easily go a few days with lights out with no problems.... i wasnt expecting everything to be perfect when i got home and i couldnt stop thinking about the tank all week and when i got home sunday night this is what i found.... all fish suprisingly still alive, lps/softies fine (for the most part) my pink mille totally bleach laying upside down in the sand, idaho grape cap starting to rtn, miami orchid starting to rtn, ora green birdnest almost all the way dead, red cap rtn pretty bad, 20 tubs polyps gone, green encrusting monti all the way dead,superman monti gone, ora blue polyp german digitata colony gone, and a few others i cant think of off the top of my head ....not as bad as i was expecting after 2 days with no power but still a huge loss... he ended up plugging the lights in but told me one wasnt working which didnt seem like a big deal since he didnt kno which plug was which and when i came home to straighten everything out i find that the light that didnt work ther was a noise coming from the ballast so i immediatly unpluged it and found that the blub was cracked! im very happy my 6" hippo tang and 4" purple tang are both ok since both of them run close to $100 a piece and wouldnt be able to be replaced... ive had a few of the local reefers i originally got the frags from offer a few new frags for free so thatll help for sure but itll be a while before i cant get the sps count back anywhere close to where it was since im still trying to get this 30g setup so aside from replacing the broken bulb no other money will be spent on the 125g
