What do you do when you go out of town?
- Thread starter siege
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I travel periodically and have a friend of my son feed fish 2x per day. I have one of those 2 week pill organizers. Put one serving per section of frozen and keep in freezer. Easy but not free.
Could do some auto feeder for pellets don’t trust it. While I can afford to hire help I will.
Plan plan plan….I do a water change, fill dosing containers, fill auto topoff, empty skimmer cup. Never add new corals or fish before I leave. Never make any change that requires monitoring.
Nobody loves your tank like you do. There’s only so much you can expect of others.
Could do some auto feeder for pellets don’t trust it. While I can afford to hire help I will.
Plan plan plan….I do a water change, fill dosing containers, fill auto topoff, empty skimmer cup. Never add new corals or fish before I leave. Never make any change that requires monitoring.
Nobody loves your tank like you do. There’s only so much you can expect of others.
SMALL water change before you leave (10%, 20% TOPS), dial lights back to half power or half the normal "daylight" period. Make sure skimmer is on and empty.This was a great post. i recently went out of town and came back to a green tank.It take over an hour to clean LOL
any ideas ?
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Follow-up: do the water change no less than 24, ideally about 48 hours before you leave, that way you have some time to test parameters again and make any minor corrections if needed, but never do anything drastic. Better salinity be a little low for a few days than to raise it quickly, for example, as long as it isn't too far out of range to be safe.
Dialing the lights back is an easy one: corals and fish get cloudy conditions all the time in the wild, even in the sunniest of reefs. What we do in our tanks, with perfectly reliable lighting 7 days a week 365 days a year is patently unnatural, and except maybe in rare cases with certain corals, they can all stand a few days of lower light, blues and whites (or even just whites) only, simulating cloudy or storm conditions, etc.
Just keep in mind to bring the photoperiod and/or intensity back up gently afterward so as to minimize stress on your photosynthetics.
Kinda like with the aforementioned salinity (as I myself only recently learned), most things will handle a drop to a low condition much more readily than a spike to a high.
I have 2 giant breed dogs (Newfoundland dogs) and there are not many people out there who I would trust to care for them the way I like. So I fly my father-in-law in who treats them like the family they are. I’m doing this in June and will set up my tank so all he has to do is feed the fishies. I’ll pre-portion the food so he knows how much.
Before I go I’ll do a water change and change all filters. My skimmer has a sensor to shut off if it is full and my ato can handle a whole week of water so it’s good there. I have hydros so I have redundancy and alarms in place where needed.
Before I go I’ll do a water change and change all filters. My skimmer has a sensor to shut off if it is full and my ato can handle a whole week of water so it’s good there. I have hydros so I have redundancy and alarms in place where needed.
This is great information, does the group host classes about upkeep.
Similar to what others have said, I went to New Zealand for a month last fall and did the following:
- did 15% water changes each day for the 5-7 days leading up to when I left
- got a cheap wifi camera set up to visually monitor in case I needed someone to come and take action
- set up Apex to auto turn feed mode on and line up pellet auto feeder to feed during these times (I used a floating feeding ring so the food would sink)
- set up the brute garbage can with ATO water and added what I calculated was the appropriate amount of dKH/Calcium additive to keep things relatively accurate
- had a person periodically turn my filter roller mat (I don't run a skimmer)
I left knowing I had a bryopsis issue, and the person I had periodically checking on it, pulled some bryopsis out while I was gone, but everything was totally fine.
- did 15% water changes each day for the 5-7 days leading up to when I left
- got a cheap wifi camera set up to visually monitor in case I needed someone to come and take action
- set up Apex to auto turn feed mode on and line up pellet auto feeder to feed during these times (I used a floating feeding ring so the food would sink)
- set up the brute garbage can with ATO water and added what I calculated was the appropriate amount of dKH/Calcium additive to keep things relatively accurate
- had a person periodically turn my filter roller mat (I don't run a skimmer)
I left knowing I had a bryopsis issue, and the person I had periodically checking on it, pulled some bryopsis out while I was gone, but everything was totally fine.
That could be a very interesting topic for one of our meetups at some point.
I've got someone staying at my house to take care of the dogs and cat. Hopefully he can manage feeding my fish. Other than that I'll have my ATO plenty full and an auto dosing pump running.
I do a little water change, feed a lil extra, and fill up an ATO if I don’t have a friend watch it. I also pray XD
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