How did fellow hobbyists go in the black outs around Aus day.

I feel so sorry for the hobbyists that have had power out for over a week! How the hell the do you keep a highly stocked marine aquarium for that long with out power?
I for one can’t afford a generator, though I will have to try, we nearly lost all the frozen meats down stairs I stock up on once each three months. We lost power for 32 hours; I have never lived anywhere when power has been off for over 6 hours in my life.
Even the big flood where I come from in the country when I was 11,we got cut off from the main area of our country town and had to use a canoe to get food.
We didn’t loose power then at all, but we did have a several mile swimming pool for a paddock out the back,lol.
That year we got carp in the dam; the leaches had a field day!

I am lucky compared to many I suppose; all I lost was four of my oldest corals,4 fish of the 30 and 5 of my newer corals and one porcelain crab.
The worst was I lost my endemic dottyback,the hybrid anthia and my second piece of coral I collected for the NWMS run tanks in April 2011.
The dotty back was around four months off completing its morph and proving that it's not five different species,it's one that morphs to the other sex and looks totaly different along the ways.

I stuffed up with it all, I forgot to start ammo lock and PH buffer for over 12 hours; if it weren’t for that I would have lost nothing. A wonderful natural system is nothing with out power or when you do something stupid like that.
One of our club members called that Sunday morn asking what he should do,I told him keep the water moving some how, use heaps of ammo lock and try for alkalinity stability above anything else, then PH buff if you have to.
Then I remembered I didn’t do these things! I looked in that dark room down stairs with a torch and saw all my fish gasping at the surface, I screwed up, I got into it and saved most of my pets.
The lights came on 32 hours later and all parameters were spot on with in three hours of power on.
No harm to the system at all, because I pored water from the sump to the top once every now and then to keep algae and other aerobic life going for when the power comes on or the ammonia explosion will kill everything!

My tubs are now jammed solid with all the tanks contents with only my corals that completely bleached still in the bottom tank to get pics of them as they recover.
Once they have got the right algae on board the tanks will go the way I had intended in the first place, inverts up the top protected by the algae and fish in the bottom tank.
It was lucky, on the Saturday before the power outage I had our club pres over and swapped him my clown triggor,adult clown wrasse and some others, I was sick of them and wanted a change and he lost non of them, well done!
It was a shame I lost a few things because the energex auz weekend of low staff numbers and the new shopping centre over loads our power supply, this was the third time in two years, the other times were never more then 4 hours of power off though!

Oh well, it was getting boring, you see the experiment worked so well with the use of nature to run the waters to near pristine conditions that I wanted a change and had already got rid of some things I was bored with.
By Easter I will have a slight variation,still with the NWMS to play with once the corals have repaired them selves.
That’s my story from the power outage, are there any others?

I was away at work and my wife was left to deal with everything. The power went out twice at my place, the first time was only 10 hours no problems. The second time the power was out 38hrs and the Telstra network was down so couldn't call and give my wife directions.

I lost all my fish and all my sps, absolutely devastated. Especially gutted over losing my latezonatus female. My wife, bless her, did do 2 water changes as soon as the power came back on and was able to save a lot of my coral. It's been over 2 weeks now and finally back home to start the recovery process.

I almost want to re-scape everything and re do the sump. Where to start?

No problems over that period, I'd pre-empted it by getting in ahead a couple of weeks earlier with an Safety Switch trip while I was at work.

Corals survived, but nothing much else.

I had a warning that something was wrong with my home network but didn't think of the power being off.
I'm trying to give myself a better options to check on it when I'm not at home, a UPS on the phone, modem and a webcam which can see the tank including the power light on the chiller. I still need to do some testing on the UPS to see how long it will keep that gear running for.

I UPS with a decent battery running the main circulation pump could be valuable but I've not yet worked out enough detail to want to spend on that.

Other than that if I was getting electrical work done a couple of different circuits protected by their own safety switches might be useful to keep reduce the chances of all power being off from a fault in the house.

Bob