Battery Back up

[thrasher]

I was away from my tank for a few days this past weekend and was stressing about the storms. I have a generator, but if I'm not around to get it going, it's not helpful. Does anybody use a Battery back up ? What are your thoughts? features you like don't like/ pitfalls? I think I'd just want something to keep my heater and pump going for a few hours.

any advice would be apreciated
-thanks

 

[jcook54]

I have Ecotech's battery backup for my powerheads but nothing specific for the heaters. I've been looking at various generators and have considered getting a battery backup as well. I'm interested to see what others might have to say. I have a boat with 3 deep cycle batteries and my power outage plan has always been to pull the batteries and run them with an inverter that I keep in case of such an emergency. Of course that requires that I'm home...

 

[lmm1967]

So many of the home grade UPS devices end up with very short battery life IMO. I got tired of dealing with the things - replacing batteries, the silly things just flat out failing - seemed like I was replacing batteries on one or more of these things every 2 or 3 months and the stupid replacement batteries never lasted a full year. I got tired of all that and went to an automatic generator.

I do keep a few things (not directly tank related) on a UPS - mainly my internet gateway & wireless router so the internet doesn't go down.

If you are looking for a solution to keep your tanks alive for a few days at a time - your best option is a generator tied into the house that fires up automatically.

If only a couple hours - why not just set up some sort of monitoring that would tell you when power is out and trigger you to head home within an hour?

Bottom line - and this is just my opinion - non-enterprise class UPS / battery backup devices are not trustworthy enough to keep a tank alive while you are out of town for days at a time - and many of them are flakey enough that I'm not trusting of them for even a 30 minute outage.

 

[wake125122]

I know BRS did a video on these and it seems like the best ones are ones that are specifically made for tanks. I know Icecap just released a new one recently. Might be a good starting point.

 

[lmm1967]

I know BRS did a video on these and it seems like the best ones are ones that are specifically made for tanks. I know Icecap just released a new one recently. Might be a good starting point.

Admittedly - I have never used one of the aquarium specific backup devices - they may absolutely be more reliable than the APCs & others sitting in my junk pile.

 

[wake125122]

I watched the video and I was actually very surprised about how much better the aquarium specific ones did. They were less power but lasted much much longer.

 

[gill]

I have the ecotech backup for my MP40, which will keep flow going if I am not there. Not too worried about temperature, my understanding is that flow is what is important. Also have a propane backup that I used last weekend.