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Hello All
Thinking of spending some serious money on a Discus display tank and I don't want my investment to go the drain with the first blackout.
What does everyone do to protect themselves from loss of power. I have heard of marine deep cycle batteries has anyone used these or other alternatives.....Thanks
Water has a fantastic capacity for heat retention. depending on the size of your tank you could let it dip down to 24C with no ill effects (short term of coarse). this should take several hours on a discus tank. your biggest risk is the drop in dissolved oxygen with the filters off or worse when they come back on.
I've never used deep cycle batteries but you would need to convert DC from the battery to AC for your tank equipment to use it.
you may be better off with a proper UPS or as I did having a couple of battery powered airpumps on hand to keep the surface movement up and the O2 levels high in the event of a blackout.
I have a tanginykian tank with a lot of wild Frontosa in it so for the same reason I set up a home made UPS.
Battery deep cycle
Battery charger, make sure you get one that can go into float mode
Inverter
Plug the charger to the power, connect to the battery and connect the inverter to the battery. I only run an air driven filter off this but it runs 100 % of the time. If the power goes off the air pump keeps running for up to 36 hours.
Don't make the mistake of running everything off a dedicated or home made ups as you will just flatten it real quick.
This has saved me a few times and cost about the value of two of the fish.