power outage

[Mike L]

 My home will be hit with a power outage for 3-5 hours for some repairs. I have a 75 gallon show tank and a 20 gallon long breeder with multi's that have 15-20 fry in it as well as the adults. I plan on putting a battery powered airstone in the breeder and leaving the rest alone. I will do a water change tonight on both and not feed them as well. Any advice would be helpful.
Mike

[charlie]

Good Plan, if you are worried about temp. drops- wrap the tanks with some blankets to try & keep the temp in the tank.

[Mike L]

 Thanks  for the advice. I plan on picking up some mylar blankets as well today. Both tanks are in the man cave  in the basement. The temp is supposed to get to plus 3 tomorrow but still.

[exv152]

To add to that, don't feed your fish leading up to it, and during the outage, this'll help reduce the waste. 

[Mike L]

 Thanks again for info.
Should I be doing anything with the filters. Large tank has Eniem 2217 and 2 -1200 power heads. Breeder has aquaclear 50 with an additional sponge filter on the intake. It was suggested by andrew at BigAl's west that I unplug the ehiem and then remove lid to allow for aeration of water.  I was also thinking that the aquaclear will likely drain when power is lost exposing the filter media to the air. I'm thinking that I should place the filter/media in the waterchange water until power is back then replace after it is running again. Is any of this overkill.
Regards Mike

[Stussi613]

The water in the hob will drain, but what I've done in the past is take some tank water and refill the chamber as soon as the power goes off.

During the summer we had a power failure that caused the hob on my Edge to empty, then the power came on, it tried to restart but obviously couldn't and was making a high pitch whine when we got home. Judging by the clock on the stove it had been like that for at least 6 hours. I turned it off, refilled it, started it back up and it's been running ever since and I lost zero livestock.

All this to say the bacteria in the filter should be fine, as long as the media is covered with water.

[Jeff1192]

I agree as well, what you're doing is more than enough for an outage of that length. I used to live in an area that had at least 5-7 outages a year and they were often 5hrs or more. I never really did anything and my fish were fine.

Jeff

[fever]

Cichlids are tough, I wouldn't worry about them at all, we have had many power outages over the years and havn't lost a fish