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Hey guys

I am currently out of the country and I have ran out of RO water on my ATU.

The aquarium should hold on ok but the main problem I have is that since I had to stop the return pump the DT is not getting any heat. The temperature in my apartment is normally around 24-28 degrees even in winter but I would feel a bit better if I can get some RO water into the sump.

Problem is that the cat minder is the only one who has a key and he only visits twice a day, once early in the morning and another one late evening. My plan is for someone close to where I live to drop him like a bucket (or container) with some RO so I can then put into the ATU... but I want to see if I can get some RO first!

Anyone close enough to sandyford that has time tomorrow to do it (I am concious is xmas as well).

like I said, if nobody can I think it should be ok, I will be coming back on monday evening anyway, so its only like 40 hours... and the DT is not gonna ran out of water, just the temperature that worries me a bit. I will try to get the cat man to turn the heating on in the apartment, that should increase the temperatures to about 26-30 degrees... probably my safest option if I can't get RO in.

Thanks!

Buddy if I had known sooner I might have been able to do something! Sorry mate not around myself for the next few days

Hey guys

Thanks for your replies..

I am back at home now and everything is fine. I worked up a plan and it worked in the end so happy days, but it could have been a disaster!

In the end I remembered I had like 1/4 of salt water bucket in the bathroom so I asked the cat minder to pour it into the sump, then used the 3k pump to recirculate water in the sump, heat it up and then activate the return pump so get some warm water in the aquarium, also turned on the heating to make sure temperatures wouldnt get too cold, specially at night. I timed the Apex to automatically do this several times during the day. So basically run the 3k and turn off the heaters, when the temperature in the sump would reach 22 degrees it will automatically turn the heaters on until it would reach 26 degrees, then, the 3k will go off and the return will start to work for about 1 h. The heaters will remain on, once the temperature in the DT would go up to 24 degrees (24.5) I will switch off the return and heaters, and turn the 3k sump pump on. I would also turn the t5 on for a few hours to help heat up the DT. The two gyres were operating as usual providing O2 for the fish.

It repeated this process until I got home yesterday night.

Tank glass is filthy. I would do a big water change soon, probably tomorrow, fish are ok, no white spots. From what I can tell, the temperature in the tank never went below 23 degrees (or at least around 23 -+ 0.5 degrees) which is excellent.

Few lessons learnt, leave plenty of spare RO water containers before I leave and try to get a bigger container for the sump, around 40l minimum. Also, I need to provide a back up container to fill up the 40 liters container, that should give me enough RO for at least 2-3 weeks.

I will also leave a back up heater laying around so that if the worse happens the cat guy can just put it in the DT to help with the temperature.

Another thing I could have done and was gonna do in the event I hadnt found the salt water container was to remove the full siphon return pipe (the top) and leave the pipe open from the top at barely 2 cm from the edge of the glass, this will give me a bit more time before running out of water since ATM when running full siphon the water level in the overflow sits at around 8 cm, so the extra 6 cm would give me around 7 liters of extra water and most importantly it will stop the water level variations before the full siphon kicks in which is what caused the issue in the first place since the system is set to automatically shut off when the water level in the return section of the sump reaches certain height!

Anyway thanks again guys, glad nothing happened in the end scary to think the tank was running like this for almost 3 days!