Power Loss! GRRRRRR...

So we were out of town for the holiday weekend. I put out my auto fish feeder, made sure that the ATO was good on water, and away we went.


So I get home today, and I look down our stairs to the basement. There should at least be some level of "blue glow"... There isn't...


I get to the bottom of the steps, and I don't hear the pump, skimmer, or powerheads running.... The water is down a couple of inches from the top of the display tank.. Crap!


I know EXACTLY what happened. The stupid Arc Fault Breakers that are code everywhere now tripped again. This happens when I run our paper shredder, or if my wife is vaccuuming in the basement and I am playing my pinball machine and one of the electro magnets kicks in, or about a dozen other "false alarm" pops of the breaker.


The basement breakerbox is about 20 feet away, so a run and flip the breaker back on. The water was at about 72F (a little lower than I usually keep it, and obviously had hit room temp in the basement). I only saw my 2 clownfish and they were moving slow. Could be that the lights were out, but probably has a lot to do with low oxygen in the tank. The corals actually looked pretty good, which was strange.


I reset the clock on the light timers and slowly saw all but 1 fish (the very shy firefish) come out. Cleaner shrimp, emerald crabs, and starfish all seem OK.


So I didn't lose anything, but grrrrrr.... I threw away the $3.50 regular breakers that were in the unfinished basement when we finished it 2 years ago because the Arc Fault were required to pass Code. The stupid Arc Faults are literally 10 times the price and the internet is filled with horror stories about how easily they trip. So I am going to Menards tomorrow to buy a $3.50 one for the circuit to the fish tank. I will leave the Arc faults in everywhere else, and hang on to the Arc Fault breaker that I take out for any future need.


Now before someone says "you should have some sort of battery backup for a cheap pump" etc, I do. Unfortunately it only lasts about 24 hours when running the small emergency heater (possibly not needed), bubbler, and small powerhead for my 120 tank. According to the light timers, it looks like power went out Saturday night around 9:30pm, and the tank was without any primary or backup systems for almost a full 24 hours. Really surprised that the fish didn't die.


I bought the battery backup figuring that if there was a storm that killed power to the whole house for some period of time up to 24 hours (which would be pretty darn long since we have not had a single power outage for the whole house in the 3.5 years that we have lived here. Not even once. I never thought that the breaker itself would be going against me.