While the cat's away

[dougc]

It figures. Everything is humming along smoothly for months. Last Monday, I left early in the morning for California, leaving my son in charge of feeding the fish and keeping an eye on things for the week. I got home late Friday evening at 10 PM and find only my VHO actinics on, which is what I would expect at that time of the night. Everything looked OK and I left early Saturday morning to spend Memorial Day weekend at the Jersey Shore. We got home Monday at about 8 PM and I knew something was wrong as soon as I pulled in the driveway. At that time, all the halides should have been blazing away, but only the purple glow shone from the family room window. My halides are all controlled by my AquaController II and are plugged into a direct-connect module (DC4HD). It turns out that the fuse was blown, which shouldn't happen, since the 3 ballasts only draw 6.3 amps and they get turned on one at a time.

At this point, my 16 year old pipes up and says "Oh, yeah. The lights haven't been on all week.". Arrggghh!!!! My wife said she doesn't really know when lights should be on or off and never noticed the problem. The alleged caretaker said that he was never around the tank during the time that the halides are on. Three pairs of eyes and nobody noticed.

The good news is that there appears to be no permanent damage from a week without lights. A couple of corals browned up a bit, but that is about it. The DC4HD is on the way back to Neptune to see if they can determine why the fuse blew. Apparently, there have been cases where the fuseholder is defective, causing the fuse to pop at a current below the fuse rating. I juggled things around and have the halides on the second DC4HD for now.

I had one more problem when moving around equipment. The DC4HDs and the X10 control module are daisy-chained to the AquaController. When I bypassed the dead DC4HD and plugged the wire into the second DC4HD, my chiller kicked on, all the lights shut down, and the Low Battery warning came up on the AquaController. I knew what that meant. The date and time on the AquaController had reset to January 1, 1996.

Reef tanks are full of evil gremlins. They wait for us to be far away or inattentive to play their dirty little tricks. I usually prepare better for trips, leaving explicit instructions, checklists, and schedules for tanksitters, but figured that my own family was familiar enough with the tank to notice obvious problems. You know what happens when you assume!

My homework for this week will be to prepare detailed care instructions, troubleshooting procedures (with pictures), and directions for resetting the date and time on the AquaController. I live in fear of the AquaController whacking out when I am not around to fix it. If it is just the date and time that gets lost, it would not be disastrous. The temperature might rise or drop a couple of degrees, depending on the time of year, and the lighting schedule would be out of sync, that's about it. A more serious failure could create a terrible mess. I am almost tempted to have a second AquaController and DC4HD on hand, all set up and ready to drop in place, but that is expensive insurance.

Maybe I need a live video feed so that I can watch the tank remotely. Hmmm.

[Reefland]

I think your right Doug, it seems that nothing ever goes seriously wrong until we are away and the tank is in someone elses hands.

Help me out a little, what do you mean by this:

The DC4HDs and the X10 control module are daisy-chained to the AquaController.

[dougc]

If you are running only X10, a phone cable (RJ-11) connects the AquaController to the Control Interface, which transmits X10 signals over the power lines. When using the direct-connect boxes, the AquaController connects to the direct-connect box (DC4HD), which in turn can be connected either to another direct-connect box or to a Control Interface. Up to 4 DC4HDs may be connected in series. I use two DC4HD boxes, but also run some equipment on X10, so the last thing in my "daisy-chain" is the Control Interface.