Power failure and my fish tank

@OBI, seeing as you stay in Kempton. Take a drive to Ellies in Eloff Street Ext. They sell a 600W Inverter for R1300 that you hook up to a 12 V Deep Cell battery for R1500. Gives us about 4 hours of power on full draw (280W).

 

For the aeration part if you do not have a batter operatded pump at hand you can try the following.
Add one of those green plastic clamp for airline tubing and connect them to an airstones' pipe.
Then clamp down the tube so that no air can pass through. Blow up a big party balloon and then tape the opening of the balloon to the opening of the tubing, now you can slowly open up the clamp to adjust it that a small stream of bubbles is produced by the airstone.
Instead of tape you can maybe either just use a bottle cap with a small hole to pull the tubing through and then just stretch the balloon opening over the bottle cap.

 

One could even use a spare wheel or car tube and connect air tubing to it and regulate.

 

Not a good idea , you get oil and even carbondioxide mixed in the tyre's air. Some of the garages have done away with their compressors and are using nitrogen instead .

 

Agreed to a point but a well maintained compressor (not something from the ark)which most people have at home and most of us have oil and water traps connected inline could work, even a foot or hand pump. To pump a tube up and slowly release the air in the fish tank could work in case of emergency? After all, it is only a pump which takes in air and pumps it out at compressed rate? If the compressor rings are worn it will "burn" oil, but what are your opinions on a diaphram, foot pump or bicycle pump?

 

The garage compressors all use oil to lubricate the cylinders so you will get traces of oil even if water traps are being used, remember those are multi phase compressors so the crankcase is also under compression. The only compressors that deliver oil free air are the ones being used for filling SCUBA cylinders. Diaphram pump is best but a bycycle/foot pump also has some lubrication for the piston o ring or leather diaphram , If I didn't have a battery pump I would rather stick to the tabs ( my opinion )

 

Thanks Duke916, I would never have thought of that. Goes to show, one is never to old to learn.

 

I had considered to use battery operated pumps but with my son around I know that batteries dont stay in one device for very long nor do they stay in the drawer (spares) ... so what I did was get a small solar panel hooked up a energiser battery (electric fencing battery) and had that on a relay so when the mains went off the battery system kicked in. It worked a charm

 

@ joffyWhat do you call that relay and were do you get it?

 

I am not 100% certain. My mate is an electrical engineer and built the setup for me. I will find out and also ask if he can give a diagram of the whole thing which I will then post here so everyone can get to it

 

So I should prepare myself for a long, cold night without power tomorrow. Power outage from 22h00 - 06h00 the next morning. I hope my fish will survive. I have 2 tropical tanks, one with a 200w heater and one with a 100w heater. What kind of UPS will run these for a good couple of hours?

Thank you

 

Thanks a lot. Thinking of buying a 2000vu UPS. At least it can run the air pump and heater for a while.

 

I see a lot of guys blowing on a pipe to get some air back into the water. What I did was siphon into a bucket and pouring it back into the tank when my power was out.

 

It was just to get some oxygen back into the water itself as my oscar was gasping. I opened the canister that day and it held it's cycle. It was when we had loadshedding but the one time they left the power off for over 6 hours. It was normally only 2 hours at a time.

 

@Reedfish I see they also mentioned oxygen tablets, do they actually work? and if they do, wouldn't it be a good idea to drop one in the canister when we do have a major power out again?

 

The best bet of course would be to have a generator, that can run all your lights, tanks, heaters and filtration.

I have a 6 KVa generator connected to the DB board via a crossover switch.
When the power goes out, I change the switch to neutral, start the generator, and switch over to auxiliary power once the voltage has stabilised.
The nice thing about it is that it is strong enough to power our entire house.
The issue comes in when we are not at home, and there is a power outage.
Installing an automatic starter and cut-out switch is extremely expensive, and unless I was a commercial fish breeder would not be worth it.

 

I run 1500w UPS's on 2 of my tanks, I have added additional batteries onto each, one has an additional 6 x 12V and other 2 x 24v, I get up to 6 hours just running my return pumps from sump filter. I monitor the UPS via USB every now and then to ensure fully charged and all operational.