Frightening Fish Tank Tales

Coral reefs are fragile, but it often takes a disaster to disrupt a natural one.

Stick a coral reef into a fish tank, and it's literally on life support. A simple power outage can turn your aquarium into a mortuary in less than 48 hours.

Without power, your water pumps immediately seize up. The stagnant water quickly loses oxygen, and fish start suffocating.

Without electricity, your lights go dark. Your corals start starving because they need light to produce food.

Without a UV sterilizer, heater and protein skimmer, disease spreads rapidly as the weaker creatures start dying. The ammonia levels skyrocket, contaminating the water and eventually killing hardier invertebrates.

Race Against Time

Last year, an ordinary thunderstorm knocked out power in Chicago for 2-3 days.

We already had a battery backup system for our 250-gallon saltwater fish tank. It's larger than most fish tanks, so we spent around $400 to buy two of the biggest battery backup systems available.

What a waste! Our two battery backups ran for a whopping 20 minutes.

It doesn't take long for battery backups to go dead along with your fish. We sell generators, so we didn't have any problems finding a backup generator.

Other fish tank owners weren't so fortunate. We heard plenty of horror stories on how extremely expensive fish tanks decomposed in just a few days.

A generator sounds expensive, but it'll cost more time, energy and money to replace your fish than it does to save them.

Always run your generator outside since they produce deadly carbon monoxide gas. Don't kill yourself while saving your fish.