No I did not spill anything on the floor!!! But I was this |…| close.
I went downstairs this morning to grab a short for work to find the water in my DT dangerously close to the rim. This has been happening a lot lately since I am having a HUGE algae issue and my CUC keeps tearing algae off but not eating eat. The algae floats around until it tries to go down the drain pipes and gets hung up in the gutter guard mesh that keeps fish & snails where they belong.
Anyway - I was running late this morning. usually I will take the gutter guard out and rinse it and put it right back. Today - I didn’t have the 2 minutes - so I pulled the guard out, and said out loud “it’ll be fine until I get home” – ever have a thought that tells you “no it won’t” ? I ignored it.
Got home tonight, forgot about it, just went downstairs to do a water to change. Found the water level in the DT much lower then it should have been, the water level in the fuge much MUCH lower then it should have been, and the water in the sump within 1 inch of ending up on the floor.
At this point I still didn’t remember about the screen so my first thought is my return pump just crapped the bed. THEN I remembered about the missing screen so I looked in the input to the return pump.
There in all it’s dead spiny glory is my porcupine puffer clogging the intake and almost flooding the basement. Thank God I learned how to mark the high lone on the sump so if I ever lost power (or got a fish stuck in the return pump) I wouldn’t end up with water on the floor.
No it won’t be ok until later 3. Don’t tell the wife you killed her fish[/quote]
this is probably the scariest part of the whole story… I know mine gets upset every time we lose something, partly for the money it cost but even more so if she liked it.
Damn that sucks Craig. Sorry to hear about the Puffer. Crap always happens when ever there is the slightest opportunity.
I’ve been meaning to give you a call the last couple of nights. Give me a ring sometime the next couple of days if you don’t hear from me.
you should still put a screen type fitting on the pump intake to keep things like fish going over the falls, and snails out of the impeller. for the loose hair algae in the tank, try putting a sponge on a maxijet in the tank. it will collect a lot of the free floating stuff. then put a baggie around the sponge to remove it and clean. that way the algae wont drift off soon as you take it off the pump suction.
[quote=“kaptken, post:6, topic:1923”]
you should still put a screen type fitting on the pump intake to keep things like fish going over the falls, and snails out of the impeller. [/quote]
It’s generally not even a concern as I have a screen over the drains in the DT and a seperate fuge from the sump. So unless I take the screen off the drain there really is no way for animals to get down there to get caught up in the impeller. It’s the rare occasion that I leave the screen off for longer then a minute that something has a chance to get down there.
I use to clean my screens when I would do daily maintenance to the old skimmer(damn Red Sea skimmer). During water changes or weekly maintenance to the new skimmer I would clean the screens. FYI I would have a replacement set on standby in case you need to do a quick change. I use to keep an extra set with a rubberband around them so they could just pop in.
I still think you should get one of these as it will turn off the water.
Also a float valve tied to a relay can turn off pumps. I have one I am not currently using. It turned off the sump pump if the water level in the DT got too high.
