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Blizzard and Reefs


lewisweil

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I'm surprised to not see more talk of the blizzard. Maybe everyone is focused on recovering and not posting on reef forums. 

I've talked to other aquarium keepers and many of them have 100% loses. I lost the vast majority of my corals. We are just north of Windsor Park and Mueller. Our neighborhood lost power Sunday night. It was supposed to be for 45 minutes. We didn't reliably get power back until Thursday. Monday I tried to keep the tank warm by floating bags of seawater i heated on the stove. If we had gotten power back then it would have been ok. But between trying to maintain the household during daylight, the risk of carbon monoxide building up from running the stove, and sheltering together at night for warmth, I had to accept that I couldn't keep it up indefinitely. The house was in the 40s, I don't know how cold the tank got. 

Most of my corals I had grown from just a couple polyps. I like getting corals from the mystery $5 tank at Aqua Dome and growing them out. It hurts to see them as just white skeletons. 

We got power back Thursday afternoon. Once I was convinced it was back for good I started cleaning out the tank,  planning on breaking it down. It smelled horrible. I was shocked to find my platygyra, a gorgonian, and two leathers were still alive. Barely alive, but not dead. What started as a tank tear down turned into a rescue mission. I had luckily had some pre-mixed seawater on hand and did big water change to get rid of the detritus from the dead corals. The platy seems to be doing ok. There is some receded tissue but it seems to be stable. Platys are so expressive when you keep an eye on them. 

I am planning on giving the surviving corals away to help someone rebuild their reef and then scrapping the tank. I'm going to take a break for a bit and then start again from scratch. We are looking into solar and powerwall battery back ups and into a proper wood stove for heat. Between the rolling blackouts last summer and the possibility of the polar vortex becoming a frequent event I need to rethink the extremes that my household and aquarium life support systems are facing. 

 

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So sorry to hear what you went through Lewis, I know you weren't alone.

We're also looking at getting a standby generator.  I have friends who have solar and the powerwall but during this the panels weren't charging and a single powerwall battery pack isn't enough to run a furnace, frig, etc. It seems like generator is the way to go, at least for us.  

 

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We're looking at multiple powerwalls. I'll share in case others are looking into solar as an option. I had my call with the solar company on Saturday. If you only have one powerwall battery it only serves as a backup for a handful of lights and appliances. If you want to run your AC and any other high load equipment you need multiple powerwalls. 

In Austin and you run solar you are still on the grid, your solar output offsets energy used from Austin Energy. The credit per kwh is pretty generous. If you don't have your panels connected to a battery though and the power goes out you still lose power. Because you are on the grid the power company cuts you off too because the electricity coming from your panels is still going into the grid and would be a hazard to the people working the lines on the restoring power. If you have a battery your panels keep working because the electricity has somewhere to go. So unless you have a battery you still lose power just like everyone else. Adding batteries can be more expensive than the panels themselves. 

We have a 1600 sq ft house, its just me and my wife and our roof happens to have enough exposure that we can generate enough electricity for us to meet all our electric needs. That combined with the 0.99% financing and not having an electric bill means the math makes sense for us. You do have to check a lot of boxes before home solar is worth the trouble. 

My brother who has two kids and a bigger house opted for a generator, he would have needed a ridiculous number of batteries to cover his needs. 

I have a nissan leaf, which is 100% electric, so being able to charge in a power outage will be amazing. It was actually great having an electric vehicle this last week but that is another story. 

 

 

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The simple and relatively cheap answer is just get a generator. I have nothing against battery based systems, cost aside, but IME, nothing is going to be easier than a generator with a good engine. A good 4 stroke fuel injected engine is crucial though since ethanol in gasoline makes small carbureted engines almost unusable if any storage is involved. I went all electric with my push and riding lawn mowers because I got sick of rebuilding briggs and honda engines.

Unfortunately many of us have PEC for electricity, about 30% of Austin total, who offers exactly zero rebates or incentives on solar. I believe their buyback rate is close to or at zero now as well, they did have a promo period about 10 years ago where they offered decent terms on solar buyback, comparable to COA, but now I think it's less than wholesale even, which is like $.02 / kWh. I've got about 2500 sq ft of south facing roof, I would be all over solar if the break even time / cost wasn't about 25 years for me.

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Yeah a lot of criteria need to met before home solar makes sense.

My only things to add for folks thinking about a generator is the noise, they can be louder than you expect, especially in the quiet of a power outage. My brother who I mentioned has a pretty serious generator, run an extension cable to his neighbor during power outages. It's the neighborly thing todo and also makes them not so putoff having to deal with the noise from his generator. :) 

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Lewis,

So sorry to hear about your saga. You’ve motivated me to share my story and what I learned and to hopefully kick off some discussions about what we can all do in the future to make our aquariums more resilient.

We went through something similar here with a power outage from Monday afternoon through Friday evening. We had solar (plan A) and two Powerwalls (plan B).  The first night, we ran through the Powerwalls in about 11 hours. We made the mistake of leaving one of our home heat pumps running on the battery back-up and at those low temperatures it just drew too much power. The next morning, I expected the solar panels to kick-in, but without the grid and with the Powerwalls drained, we were unable to turn-on the inverters and capture any solar energy. We turned to rechargeable aerators (plan C) and running an extension cord from our van with a pretty big inverter and some large batteries (plan D).

Over the first couple days, the temperature in our house dropped into the low 40s. We managed to keep heaters and pumps running on our 4 aquarium systems most of the time by running power from our van idling in the driveway. I slept on a sofa near the aquariums so I could hear that the return pumps were still running. Eventually, the batteries on the van started to drain and I had to drive the van to maintain enough charge. (This included a few harrowing drives around the neighborhood on ice Friday starting at 3am.) When we couldn’t run the return pumps, we used the rechargeable aerators. Starting on day 2, we covered the tanks with blankets, sleeping bags and various packing materials to provided some insulation, but the heaters were not nearly enough to maintain normal water temperatures. Three of our four tanks dropped into the mid-high 60s and the fourth (our frag tank) dropped into the low 60s.

By the time the power came back on, we were fortunate that all of our fish had survived. We did lose a lot of coral, however, including most of the corals in our frag tank. 

(There were a few humorous moments too, at least in retrospect, including trying to warm the house with candles and a tabletop rubbing-alcohol fueled fire pit, trying to get my van out of the driveway to replenish diesel fuel and my consultations with my neighbors, all of whom are apparently electrical engineers.)

A few lessons for me:

- I ordered a portable generator. While my van was “essentially” a generator, it was not built for that purpose and came with a lot of uncertainty and risk.

- I will be very careful not to run my Powerwalls down to zero next time. I know now that I need to leave a reserve to be able to turn on my solar panels.

- It would have been nice to have a few extra aquarium heaters lying around. No heaters are built for a house in the low 40s, but (assuming I could power them) doubling up might have helped.  It also would have helped to have a heater for my 50-gallon salt water reservoir so I could consider water changes. 

- I didn’t have any working old-fashioned manual aquarium thermometers. This made it hard to really monitor the temperatures in the tanks. The readings I got in the 60s were only after power was restored and the Apexes came online.  I’ve now ordered some for less than $2 each.   

- I think the improvised insulation around the tank helped. I want to look into building some pre-cut foam insulation boards so I could just tape them on the tanks and cabinets in a time of need. This would help keep heat out during a summer-outage too.

- I decided not to run my aquarium lights during this outage in order to preserve power.  If I could power them, however, it might have been better to run the aquarium lights during the outage. It would have probably added a little heat to the tanks and might have helped the chances of my corals.  (And I suspect might have been less stressful on the fish?)

This was a tragic week for many Texans, and a real rough one for most Texans in the aquarium hobby and trade. While we aquarists probably can’t fix ERCOT and the state energy policy, I welcome further discussions about how we can avoid this kind of disaster to our aquariums in the future.

Thanks,


Richard G

 

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I'll chime in here.  I kept my tanks running with a generator.  Getting the 20g I needed a day to keep my 6500w honda running was a problem.  Finding as store with gas and power at the same time required driving in the snow and ice everyday.

Getting into solar and powerwalls is cool and all but it will only buy you a limited amount of time during a power outage.  Due to the cost and all the other factors this is a distant thrid option.  A generator and stock pile of gas before the weather event will be your second best bet.  I personally am installing a whole home generator that runs off natural gas with a propane backup in case the natural gas grid goes down.  The cost to install a large generator and permanetly wire it in with an automatic transfer switch is total $ about 3 times what the generator costs.  Most of the cost is in site prep and gas line prep.  Almost no residential house has a propey sized gas meter and gas service line to fuel a 300ft3/hr generator.  Its a very expensive option.  For me it will be a have to have as the volume of water in my house would be too much for a single 6500w generator which costs 3k already.  Also as stated over coming the thermal difference between 47 inside up to mid 70's with drop in heaters can almost be impossible.  For record my tanks run 1k watts of heaters.  The options suck but if your going to stay in the hobby long term the expenses start to add up quickly.

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I lost a lot including fish and corals I've had since the mid 90s.  Literally it will take me 25 years to get back to the point I was a few weeks ago.   I've still got a couple more weeks of cleaning and restarting but need to post stuff in KimP's thread.  Had stuff survive I didn't think would survive and unfortunately some stuff looked ok initially but started going down hill after 2 or 3 days.  I'm kicking myself as I've been putting together stuff to run my systems off solar.   I wouldn't have been able to keep the temps at 76 for 3 dyas with what I have now but I certainly could have kept some of my tanks warmer than the 57 they dropped down to. 

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