Damn Power Cut!

[aaronc]

Certainly given that it is the Daily Mail lol

 

[pippoodle]

i had some bad power cuts a few weeks ago my tanks were ok i just kept the lids slightly ajar and every so often hubby moved the water round in the tanks with the handle of the nets also moved the filters - portable ones around in the takns

all my taks were fine even after 10 hours without electric - of course we did do water changes 4 hours after power came back on

 

[Schmill]

With a cannister, following the pattern of having an internal, could you not just crack open your external, whip out the media baskets and sit them in the tank?
I wonder as well if a simple 'powerhead' would draw less power than the pumphead of the cannister. I'm thinking you could take the baskets out the cannister, sit them in the tank, place the powerhead pointed at the baskets, perhaps also breaking the surface on the 'suction' side so as to 'suck' in some air and 'blow' it through the water, and then just run the powerhead on the UPS?
Agreed that might be a bit of hassel for a 30 minute powercut, but if it was overnight then it sounds like that might let you get some sleep!

Hmmm... to make your UPS last even longer howabout a segment / electronic timer between the UPS output and the powerhead, switching it on for just 10-15 minutes each hour?

Just brainstorming here

With regards to the original UPS problem, perhaps it needs some new batteries, but again, sometimes these batteries are just as expensive (if not more) than a new UPS

 

[rabbut]

You could indeed treat you exturnal as an internal, and crack it open, throwing the media into the main tank. The powerhead idea probibly won't work however, as it will only push water to the outer edge of the media, and nothing will flow through the media iteslf, due to it being thicker than internal's media typically is

All the best
Rabbut

 

[waterdrop]

Schmill, I think that'd be a great idea, rigging up a timer situation if you knew you were going to have a lot of cuts or a long cut. Of course, if they are long enough to have a gas generator running, then I suppose you might just decide to only run the noisy generator some of the time and you could just connect your filter to that power for 5min or so ever couple of hours to be sure that water has been exchanged for the bacteria. In some ways it almost seems like there might be call for a cannister filter product that had a hand crank on the side, kind of like some of those "weather radios" do for when your batteries die out in a hurricane (whoops, you guys don't get those as much as we do, do you!)

~~waterdrop~~
ps. rabbut, I completely agree that not much ammonia exchange would take place inside sponges or media that was just sitting in tank water. a manual siphon driven exchange of water through the filter box is better in my opinion.. but maybe I've been off this topic too long to remember all the angles..

 

[Tolak]

There's a trick you can do with canisters. Put a bucket on the floor, take the spray bar hose out of the tank & toss it in the bucket. When you have siphoned some water through the filter put the spray bar back in the tank, and pour the water in the tank. Keep an eye on the bucket when filling, you don't want a flood.

In a fully stocked or overstocked tank the O2 deficiency will kill fish faster than the lack of bio filtration. With a filter you can't pour or siphon water through get a plastic cup of an appropriate size for the filter media, you want the media to fit tight. Poke some holes in the bottom of the cup, clip this to the inside rim of the tank. Pour some tank water through every so often.

 

[loraxchick]

Tolak,
i wish i had read your recent post about a week ago. we had a huge ice storm in the NE us (dont know if you know) and my filter is now dead (no bacteria)...all my fish luckily survived, but now back to tons of water changes! wish i had thought of the "media in a cup with occasionally running water thru them". would have saved me a lot of worry and new-found effort after 8 months of cycled tanks!
CHEERS!!!!