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Tom's aqualifter plugged in to outlet.

So due to me not being clear when giving my wife directions to plug in my ATO pump, she plugged it into an outlet rather than into the ATO switch. To make things worse, the valve for my ro-di was on so it kept filling up my reservoir... it probably ran about 18 hours. I just woke up to find snails on the sand, and corals not looking good. Fish and cleaner shrimp appear to be OK. Salinity is sitting at 1.016. Its typically around 1.026. I'm freaking out but my quick search is saying to calm down and raise it over a few days. My question is how fast should I raise it back up? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Tim
 

njtiger24 aquariums

Officer Emeritus
Article Contributor
I have alwasy heard to raise it slowly over the next couple of days but never personally ran into it. you def want to take it slow so not to shock the corals even more
 

Trio91

Administrator
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this happened to me before when my smart ato went nuts and dumped 5gal into my DT.

i just topped my tank off with saltwater by hand. I may have gotten lucky but it did work for me without any issues
 

redfishbluefish

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Yes, you want to raise it slowly....you can go down fast, but coming back up needs to be slow. The easiest and best way to do this, and be slow and consistent is to use saltwater as your top-off water. This way your tank gets a little squirt every so often, slowly raising salinity. The other way is by water changes (10 - 20 %), but the problem with that is that the change is abrupt.
 

Mark_C

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NJRC Member
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Ran into a similar situation couple years back on a 20g. Dropped 5g of what I thought was saltwater in, it was rodi. Bit of an initial shock to the fish and corals but all survived.Think I dropped to about 1.017 or 1.018.
I took a 2 quart Home depot container of water from the aquarium every 12 hours, added salt, and re-added it to the aquarium raising the salinity by .002 every 8-12 hours (so from 1.018 to 1.020, 1.022, etc back to 1.026).
Took me about 2 days, but no harm done in end, thought he corals took a few days to open up again.
 
Thanks for all the replies. Changed about 20 gallons out so far over 4 changes. Haven't seen a rise in SG yet but in a 200 gallon system, I guess that's to be expected. I'm not freaking out as much.

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IMG_20170423_145036013.jpg SG almost back to normal. Definitely lost a bunch of turbos and 1 coral. I though I lost this coral too, but if look from above he has just a hint of green left and there are polyps expanding. Hope he pulls through.
 
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