My tank is doing pretty horribly.
It’s full-on crashing, it really is a mess.
A chance to almost start over.
At least my fish are doing well!
My clownfish have been laying eggs about once every couple weeks.
Then they’re guarding them as the other fish eye them as food.
Hi guys and girls, I’m ReefMan, and I wanted to take a moment to talk about what to do
after things take a turn for the worse.
Though I play a coral biologist on the internet, I’m an engineer by day.
I work on mobile applications and one thing we always strive to do is ship the highest
quality app we possibly can to our users.
That doesn’t always happen.
Engineers are people too, we make mistakes.
We overlook an important detail, whatever it might be.
So too in reef aquariums - when things are going well and everything is humming along
I think we tend to get a bit lax.
We let things slide that maybe we shouldn’t.
We don’t test our water as much as we probably should - the tank’s doing well after all.
We’ll notice it if it starts to change.
The problem is that things are changing, you just can’t always see them.
No matter what you’re told, every moving part in your aquarium, every LED, it’ll
one day wear out and fail.
Every LED diode gets a fraction less bright every day, every hour it’s on.
The bearings in the fans that are cooling your lights get dusty and the motor has to
spend more effort overcoming that friction.
Plastic impellers wear out, the plastic coating on magnets gets damaged and they corrode into
the water.
Things happen.
In my tank, I got too comfortable and let things run on autopilot a little too long.
Now, we see the effect of that - a full on tank crash.
At this point, I’m honestly counting the coral that might survive rather than the coral
that isn’t going to make it.
It’s really depressing.
So, as an engineer, what would I do?
The app is crashing for millions of users.
Let’s release a quick patch to fix it, to stop it from crashing.
I found the corroding pump, and removed it from the system.
I added copper and heavy metal absorbing resins to the water, and today I have a Triton ICP
test that shows zero Copper or related heavy metals remaining in the water of my tank.
So, the app crash has stopped.
Our users are happy, they’re able to use the app again.
Maybe under the covers the code is a lot more messy, but it works.
Hurray!
The next thing that an engineering team might do is call a meeting, a meeting that might
be titled as a Retro or Retrospective or even a Root Cause Analysis.
We’ll invite all the people involved in the crash, the person who originally wrote
the code, the QA people who helped triage the crash and test the fix, the team lead
or whoever signed off on the code, and of course the people involved in writing the
fix.
The goal of the meeting is not to assign blame, it’s to figure out exactly what led up to
the crash, and to make sure it cannot happen again.
So, in my tank, there’s no one involved other than myself.
What led up to the crash?
Overly lax equipment maintenance habits.
Had I been checking and cleaning the pumps more often I’d have noticed the wear or
small cracks developing in the plastic housing before the motor windings were fully exposed.
Ok, so now that we know exactly how the crash developed, how it came to be, what can we
do to ensure that a similar crash doesn’t happen again?
I'm building a new manifold to run the various reactors and my chiller under my sump.
This will eliminate a few smaller pumps, making it impossible for them to cause issues.
The manifold will be run by a ReeFlo pump which runs externally to my sump.
Having the pump external will make it easier to see if something catastrophic happens to
it.
It’ll make it easier to do maintenance as well, turning off valves and disconnecting
two unions would allow easy removal of the pump.
These kinds of pumps also cannot leak copper into the water, there simply is no way for
water to contact anything like copper motor windings.
This does leave my return pump, and the pump running my skimmer.
Both of these are made by a company named Vertex - which is no longer around.
They’re sort of ticking timebombs at this point, and the pumps are as old as my tank
is today - about 6 years old.
I need to address these before they also cause issues - though for now they seem to be ok.
I do have plans to maybe use a second ReeFlo as a return pump, eliminating that older beloved
Vertex pump as a potential issue.
That just leaves my skimmer, and given the space I have to work with, I might just have
to keep a close eye on it rather than replacing it with one fed from my manifold.
I’m going to wait to see how this manifold runs before planning out changes to my return
pump.
One project at a time!
We’ll see how loud the pump is, for one.
ReeFlo pumps get high marks for reliability over years, and the company has been producing
them basically unchanged for as long as I’ve been in saltwater tanks.
So that’s the retro.
The cause of this crash was my lax equipment maintenance routine.
The fix is ensuring that pumps are fewer in number, more easily accessible, and easier
to maintain so that I’m willing to do it more often.
I think you should do similar exercises on your own tanks, or really any time you have
a major issue or change - good or bad.
There’s always a cause, or a series of things leading up to it.
There’s always something you can do to prevent, or encourage, those things from happening
in the future.
So I hope this helped in that regard!
Right now in the water phosphorus is off the chart - all living cells contain phosphorus
and so I think that’s the probably major source of it as things are dieing.
Once I have my manifold built - maybe this week - I might hook up a GFO reactor to help
remove it from the water.
Thanks for watching.
Let me know if you’d do something differently, I’m curious for feedback.
Take a moment to subscribe if you enjoyed the video.
Stay safe, be kind to each other, and have a fantastic day!
Bye!