Planning for disaster!

Laura and Jim will be hosting the May meeting this Saturday the 12th and it will be the usual of food, drinks, raffle and fun.
 
Doors will be open at 6:00 pm for social talk and the meeting will start at 7:00.  Parking gets a little tight and the city says you can't park on 4th but there is a parking lot a block away.   Meeting is usually held in the backyard so feel free to bring your favorite lawn chair, weather permitting of course.

If you need address/directions, contact a club member.

Best if you park at Mini Mall (where the spaghetti establishment use to be)
 
You will get to see his new frag tank set up in the making.
 
Hope to see you there!

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[Rico]

A little story on why I am glad I planned for disaster in the design of my system.

Last Saturday night I noticed the temp on my reef was up to 87 degrees and climbing.  So I assumed there must be a problem with the chiller.  Since my daughter had 4 nine year old girlfriends spending the night I could not get into the situation right away, so I killed the Halides knowing they are the main reason the temp goes up.  Monday I finally had time to start looking at the problem and found that one of my 2 feed pumps decided to eat itself for dinner and was making an god awful noise.  Ok, now I close the suction and discharge valves to isolate the pump and remove it from the system.  Now I a really glad I have a second pump in parallel in my system to keep everything happy, even though the flow is reduced with only one pump running, and my halides are still off.  Turns out the failed pump is the one that fed the chiller and with it down, the temp went up.  Ok, I rebuild the pump with parts from my spare and get it going again.  Now I will monitor the temp to see if the chiller does its job, and it should.

Some of you may remember when I tried to give away my extra chiller single stage controller at the last meeting. I was not using it because I had purchased a two stage controller for both heat and cooling.   Now I am really glad it didn't go away.  Because I am going to set it up to shut down my Halide lights when the temp gets too high.  That way if I am gone I don't have to worry about over heating the tank.  Yesssss, another worry gone!

If you are in the planning stages of a system, try to plan for failure of critical components (pumps, heaters etc) and have a backup so your tank doesn't die while you are frantically trying to fix it.  Also think of ways to stop problems from occuring as I do with the float switch on my tank to stop over flowing the system and now the controller to stop over heating my tank.

Rick

[The Apprentice]

I hope all ended ok and for some one who is starting out this is a super starting point for what to get and plan for in the future i struggle every day hoping not to create hazzards for my reef tank. How hard was it to hook the temp controler to the Halide circuit???What brand of temp controler is the best?    Have lots to learn ..The Apprentice

[Yellotang]

So Awesome Rico, Glad everything is fine. Have you thought about getting a temp sensor with an alarm? Another thing we should talk about is disaster prevention at this month's meeting.

In other words put together a list of as many disasters that can happen to a tank, their main problem, and then a solution to them.

I can actually if we really want to do this right. Because I am learning to be a secondary ed teacher, there are excersizes that they taught us by doing group style brain storming.

How this works is that everyone gets a sheet. On the sheet is labled different sections. 1. potential problem 2. potential outcome of problem 3. potential solution 4. desired outcome 5. what needs to change in order to avoid potential problem.

In this way, we will have a group of people think of all the disasterous things that can happen to your tank and how we can elleviate the otential disaster.

Just my thought.