SO glad I keep a spare return pump on hand!!!

S

Serk

So, last night I was getting ready to go to bed, and heard this weird CLICK-CLICK-CLICK sound coming form near the reef...

Went to investigate. It was the GFCI outlet that most of my reef it powered on, it sounded like it was trying to trip, but wasn't tripping... This, obviously highly concerned me.

After some quick troubleshooting (Unplugging things to see what made it stop) I found out the Quiet One 6000, my main return pump, was what was causing it. Thinking the outlet might just be overloaded, I plugged the pump into a different GFCI outlet, and got an immediate throwing of the GFCI breaker.

Okay, so bad pump. After midnight. Nothing opened...

I am SO glad I make it a policy to keep at least one larger sized pump on my spare shelf! It SO paid for itself last night!

So, instead of a night spent panicking, maybe running around town begging for a pump, less than 5 minutes of work swapping out the pump, and the tank's running, and I'm off to bed, with a mental note to get a new spare pump on my next DFS order...

Anyway, just wanted to relate my experience, hoping it might prod a few more people to go ahead and pick up spare pumps and other critical items so that when you have a failure at midnight, it's a minor inconvenience, not a tank crash!

(And yeah, I still have faith in Quiet One pumps... The Quiet One 6000 that failed had been running flawlessly for 5+ years, it didn't dump goo or oil or anything else during it's failure either...)
 
I hear ya...I was going to sell my Iwaki pump that I had, but thought twice as it was the original return pump. It's in the garage in case of emergency.
 
Yeah, the brown out we had last night stopped my QO 4000, of course, it didn't restart. Had to remove it, soak the impeller and shaft in muriatic acid, then put the thing back in. I don't really blame the pump for that one though, I have no idea where my Mg levels are right now as I've been using kalk slurries to keep my pH up in the war against dinoflagellates. The calcification rate on stuff right now is crazy.

Mental note to self, mix up another batch of Mg and fix the levels this weekend.
 
There must be something about yesterdays storm. My daughter called me yesterday around 6:00PM as I was heading out of the office to tell me the that the sump/refugium was full of water and the main tank water was low. Came home to find out that the return pump stopped, I was able to get it going by cleaning and reassembling. Some of my SPS had top parts of the colonies out of the water for a while, they looked OK this morning, knock on wood.
 
I tried 3 different return pumps on the prop tank yesterday and all three gave me serious problems. Not to mention the two SEIO's that wouldnt start up for an hour until they got a soak in vinegar. Must have been a bad day for pumps. Maybe they were on strike.

Angela
 
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