Sometimes it's the little things that can wreck your reef. I was awakened this morning at 6am to the sound of my ATO running dry, which was strange because I just added a gallon of water to it before I went to sleep. When I am home I don't like to leave a lot of water in the ATO to prevent dropping my salinity too much in case something happens. I came in to the room and the return pump was running dry also, not good, but no water on the hardwood floors, so that's positive. I opened the tank cabinet and the shower curtain liner I installed as emergency leak protection in the bottom of the cabinet was within an inch of allowing saltwater onto the floor and several items laying in the bottom in front of the sump were now floating.
Using the wet dry vac revealed that 5 gallons of water was not where it should be. What happened? Where was the water leaking from? I changed the filter sock last night, did the calcium reactor return tubing come loose or did I create some other problem? No. It looks like the water overflowed out the top of my refugium (it's separate from the sump), how is that possible? Then I remembered that I removed the overflow strainer within the refugium to skim the surface of the water last night and I forgot about a single astrea snail that lives in there with the hermit crabs, pistol shrimp, and macro algae. This little snail found it's way into the pipe, blocked the opening and resulted in my wake up call this morning. I had to use the wet dry vac to suck him out, because I didn't plan on needing to take that small section of pipe apart. All is well now, no snails were harmed, and I'm halfway to a water change this morning, just not the way I planned it.
Lessons learned? Don't make any changes before bed. Plan for every everything even if it's yourself. I am super grateful that the shower pan liner trick that I took from one of @Trizzino's post years ago, saved me from having 5 gallons of water on my floor.
Using the wet dry vac revealed that 5 gallons of water was not where it should be. What happened? Where was the water leaking from? I changed the filter sock last night, did the calcium reactor return tubing come loose or did I create some other problem? No. It looks like the water overflowed out the top of my refugium (it's separate from the sump), how is that possible? Then I remembered that I removed the overflow strainer within the refugium to skim the surface of the water last night and I forgot about a single astrea snail that lives in there with the hermit crabs, pistol shrimp, and macro algae. This little snail found it's way into the pipe, blocked the opening and resulted in my wake up call this morning. I had to use the wet dry vac to suck him out, because I didn't plan on needing to take that small section of pipe apart. All is well now, no snails were harmed, and I'm halfway to a water change this morning, just not the way I planned it.
Lessons learned? Don't make any changes before bed. Plan for every everything even if it's yourself. I am super grateful that the shower pan liner trick that I took from one of @Trizzino's post years ago, saved me from having 5 gallons of water on my floor.
