Odd question, but what are the biological symptoms(seen in fish, coral, and inverts) experienced after a strong stray voltage issue. Will add details later, but headed out on an emergency call. Need to know what people who experienced something along these lines saw in their animals.
Stray voltage doesn't affect inhabitants directly. It's the same principle as a bird sitting on a transmission line.
These are the real issues with stray voltage
1. Can sometimes indicate the epoxy protecting the electrical parts of a pump, heater, etc are failing. Once it fails completely, copper can be leached into the tank and cause a crash.
2. Depending on the severity, it can be a shock hazard for you.
3. It can affect probe readings and make them misread.
4. If something grounded enters the tank near the equipment producing the stray voltage and a fish swims between the two, it can be shocked by the current.
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HLLE or lateral line disease has been attributed to stray voltage by many. Many argue that it is a myth...
I'm not convince one way or the other.
I did have a tang many years ago that had HLLE that when I added a ground probe it cleared up over about a years time.
The ground probe wasn't the only thing I did.
I added a vitamin C additive and garlic.
The actual reason it went away isn't clear to me.
For what it's worth I currently and always will use ground probes.
FWIW if the two are related (it's a lot of conjecture at this point), a grounding probe makes the problem worse, not better. Tissue damage or mutation requires a voltage gradient. If a tank is not grounded there is no current or voltage gradient.Originally Posted by CoralFan1776
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Which probes? I had a piece of equipment fail (skimmer pump) I suspect the same time as a partial tank crash at a client's home. Conductivity, pH, and two temp probes ~1' away in the same tank showed normal readings. ORP fell by 150.
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Wouldn't conductivity have changed significantly?
Conductivity is the most likely to be affected, but it often requires a voltage gradient to have any affect. If the tank is completely ungrounded there can sometimes be a small difference in a probe reading isolated from the tank (cup of tank water) compared to insitu. If the tank is grounded and not GFCI protected, the readings will go wild if a peice of equipment fails.
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Tank is not grounded, so conductivity probe being normal doesn't mean anything?
There are some instances in which the conductivity probe reading will change when a peice of equipment fails, but it usually requires a voltage gradient.
Given the current spike I see on the skimmer, that looks like a low impedance internal fault or stall and not a voltage leak to the tank. That kind of failure will have no effect on any probes. The reason the ORP issue coincided was likely due to die off and a transient increase in organic compounds due to reduced oxygenation and the skimmer failing to remove dissolved organics.
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Friday the 22nd I stopped by to feed the fish since the client was out of town. While there I removed filter socks which are only used about 15% of the time on this system. I also stirred the sand bed a bit(which is fairly new ~2months old and stirred often, so no big build up in it), and pulled the protein skimmer out to look at some rocks in a dark compartment below it.(considering moving some to the display) I then hit the feed mode on the Apex, fed the tank, and left.
Right after I left and the feed mode ended the ORP dipped(a normal feeding drops ORP ~15, it dropped ~140) and the watts(&s) on the skimmer went way high for hours)
Sunday the client called me because the tank was cloudy, mini sea stars and snails where stunned on sand bed, 1’ monti caps where white, frogspawn 80% retracted.
I have 3-4 working theories one of them being electrical current from the skimmer pump which I am thinking of eliminating.
This particular skimmer pump has it's own little controller plugged into the eb832. It no longer does anything when the outlet on the eb832 is given power. A replacement controller for the skimmer pump should be getting here tomorrow.
My guess in that situation is that the mixture of stirring the sand and the skimmer going offline (given your description, this definately sounds like a stall now) caused a mini cycle since the dissolved organics spiked with no skimmer to remove them.
It is for this reason that I never stir my sand bed. Once a month, I will lightly vaccum 1/3 to 1/2 of the sand bed (whatever I can get to in a 10 gallon change) and in between, the only sand bed stirring is from nassarius snails and my goby shrimp pair.
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The substrate is about crushed coral size and only about eight weeks old. I only disrupted the surface of about 1/3-1/2 half the tank. This didn't cloud the water at all. The max this would disrupt the ORP typically would be 10-20. (I micromanage alarms with ORP way too much on accounts like these) A drop of 75 would be surprising to me. 140 is a huge drop.
The skimmer isn't always on with this tank. The tank is usually fed 2-3 times per day and every time it is fed the skimmer is off for 1.5-2 hours. It is often programmed to be off for 8 hours a day regardless.(hoping to get more feather dusters to spawn)
Possible causes:
-Ammonia, tank was more than normal but the tank is 220 gallons there is a large MRC commercial sump and 100gallons of refugium space densely packed with Chaeto.
-Bacterial bloom
-Vermetid snails or Spiroid worm spawning
-Malfunctioning skimmer pump and stray voltage
No titanium heaters or other equipment that would ground the tank?
So I'm not sure what caused the crash but it does seem pretty unlikely that stray voltage would do this.
Even if you had some it's not as bad as some let on.
The fish are less conductive than the water around them (in a salt water tank anyway) and aren't real sensitive to it short term. I'm less sure with invertebrates and corals though...
CoralFan1776 The fish seemed fine the last two times I was there/ for at least the first 3-4 days of the event. Even when the water was cloudy, large stony corals where almost white, and small invertebrates were stunned on the sand. More recently some of the banggia cardinalfish started to hang out in the corners in an odd way, but they can be odd critters at times and at six days later whatever happened could have secondary effects on the tank.
There are titanium heaters in the tank plugged into EB832s. I will be swapping them out for more standard glass heaters shortly.(There are some on the shelf there just need time to do it and there have been higher priorities recently)
Still unsure if the current harmed things, but since the current was flowing through a cut in a no longer insulated cooper wire.... If the current didn't cause issues the copper did.(ICP came back today)
Exposed copper wire would be a significant thing. If it had AC going through it and the titanium heaters were indeed grounding the tank water then you could of had significant current flow.
As you point out it also would put copper in the water which will definitely kill corals and inverts. If you also had significant current flow the rate that the copper would enter the water column would be much higher than without it.
With the copper source gone which should of also taken the current source with it you should be able to recover though.
The copper removers work pretty well.
I hope everything works out for you on this tank...
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