I can not stress this enough. If you spend your paycheck on corals, fish, sand, etc. Why wouldn’t you want to protect your investment? I’ll give you one example…
About 9 years ago, I started my first saltwater aquarium. It was 29 gallons and boy did I love it. I had good success with it and I had some few starter or easy corals. It had a sump and an awesome seaclone skimmer. I only had VHO lighting, I think 3 lights to be exact. Anyways North Texas is famous for their “ice storms”. See we dont’ actually get that cold to get nice powedery snow that you seen in photos and movies. We just basically get ice. That year we got ice so bad that the powerlines snapped in half and we were without power for 4 days. As you might have guessed the roads were undrivable, here they use “sand” as most northern states use salt that actually melts the ice. Well here they use sand, so the roads have to be somewhat driverable.
Not giving up without a fight, I put blankets around and over my tank hoping that my fish and some corals would survive. They did not of course for lack of electricity and they were frozen to death. I am not trying to scare you by this but simply letting you know what could happen when you lose power. After that day I have had backup power in case that or something similar would ever happen again.
I picked up a power generator for around $1k at Home Depot. I encourage anyone that has over 5k in livestock to do so. It really does pay off in the long run. I still have to put the wheels on, anyone want to help with that?
