The importance of drip loops

You never think your tank is going to overflow... but 9 out of 10 aquarium owners have probably had some spillage at one time or another. This is the tale of mine, and I must say, it's great that I learned the lesson with only some minor damage. The alternative may have been my house burned down or something worse.

If you remember from my last post, I placed a large Mexican turbo snail in my HOB fuge to combat the red cotton algae problem that's currently in there. For whatever reason, this snail wanted to graze on acrylic instead of the ball of chaeto and cotton algae. Well, when I took a nap but before dozing off I started hearing the low water sound of my pre-skimmer struggling. Knowing that I had the auto-top off system, this should have made me get up, but it was a Saturday and I was tired and lazy.

Well, about 5 minutes afterwards, I heard my UPS beeping as if the electricity was off. Seeing how the rest of my house was fine, this could have either A.) been a brown out or B.) something wrong with the aquarium. I had to go turn off the beeping so I finally got up.

Well, it was unclear to me at the time, but somehow, somewhere my tank either started leaking or there was a flood somewhere. For the time being, it stopped but there's definitely a puddle in front of the tank. I checked behind the stand and it was relatively dry so after some further investigation, it seemed that the snail went towards the return flow hole, my HOB refugium overflowed, the water trickled down the heater wires and went straight into my power strips. It shorted out my timer one and tripped the GFCI switch of my dining room.

After some cleanup, I tried to start the electricity again and my day/night timer strip started smoking. Doh.

I guess the good news is that I only lost a cheap power strip to learn this lesson cause had I used the drip loop the first time, I could have lost a lot more water before I realized what went wrong. The HOB pump was about 1/3 of the way into the tank and a much bigger flood (10 gallons) could have happened if I didn't get any warning signs that got me up from my nap.

So lesson learned, don't put a giant snail in your HOB that could block the flow and use drip loops so you don't start the fire, that was always burning... since the world's been turning.