Loaches Online Forum

Well, its been a while. just thought i would post something here on my story of last night.
Everything went fine yesterday, did my usual checkup on the aquarium temp and checking fish health etc. etc. when i woke up and went to bed.When I woke up this morning at 4 am to get ready for work, the first thing i saw was a dead fish on the filter intake( i thought hey, it happens), then i go over to take the dead cardinal tetra out and see that he is not alone. All of my cardinal tetras, otocinclus catish and farowella catfish had perished. The heater had malfunctioned at some point when i was sleeping and had increased the tank temp to at least 98 degrees f. It could have been more, the reading on the thermometer only goes up to 100. This was 16 hours ago. The temp is now 83. My two angels, 3 red lined torpedo barbs and 4 khuli loaches are still alive since the incident. The khulis and angels are eating, the red lines arent so far. I suppose they are still stressed out too much.
Anybody know what my chances are of keeping all of these fish alive? I did get a new heater, did a water change and added biozyme in case the temp killed any good bacteria.
i hope all goes well

That's terrible!! I had that happen years ago when I was first started keeping fish as a kid. Like in your tank, my tank reached 98F and I lost many fish.
I have not trusted heaters since. Most of my tanks don't have heaters since they house hillstreams or other fish that like lower temps.
One of the tanks that has a heater,r ecently started to raise the temps on its own. I caught it before it got too high and now only plug in the heater for part of the day. I am thinking of putting it and maybe the other heaters, on timers so the chances of an overheating situation is lessened.
By the way, I think you're lucky to not have lost the torpedo barbs. They tend to like cooler, well oxygenated water and would have been the first ones I would have expected you to lose. I would think that by this point, your surviving fish would have a pretty good chance.

Thank you so much Jim. I sure hope they make it. I have only had them for 6 months and they are growing into such beauties. Hopefully they will eat their evening dinner. The heater on a timer sounds like a great idea. I will give it a shot. My first tank has been set up for seven years now with the original EHIEM ebo jager heater. Who knows haha

Really terrible. Hope the rest of your fish make it.

I have my heaters out of the tanks still. I will probably need to put them in this weekend -- usually they are out from April to November. During the summer my tanks stay about 80-82. When I have my heaters, I try to brush all my tanks with the back of my hand everyday to try to check for temp problems. I hate it when I am complacent, because then things go bad. Scary.

I wish you the best of luck.

I have had similar problems. I have also had a heater that if you turned it up, it went way up. Same thing with turning it down- only if the temp. was going down it would not stop it. Luckily, I have not lost very many fish because of these problems.

Good luck with the fish that are alive!

I always tend to under power when i'm looking at heaters as a lower power unit will take longer to overheat the tank.

It's also worth looking at a separate thermal control for heaters with it's own sensor.

As for the fish, if they have survived for 24hr's and seem to be largely ok they should be fine. I guess the Tetras probably died due to their smaller mass, their organs getting cooked vs the others which probably managed to be ok by the layer of flesh insulating them.

well, i sure hope the living fish arent half cooked!
The khulis and angels are eating just fine, like nothing happened. The red lined torpedo barbs are still coming out of it. My smallest red line seems to be back to normal, zooming around and looking for food when i feed. The other two are so-so. They ate a little bit. Fortunately, nobody has caught any illness so far

I hope your fish are recovering nicely. Ugh. and cooked...? That's rough =/
It's so scary to think of some of the disasters waiting to happen . So sorry you had to experience this one!

ill be ablle to tell once i get home. Hopefully they are. Just another aquarium experience, maybe it will help me for a possible future overheating disaster.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Move to the tropics.
;)
A

That's awful. That happened to me too when I was a kid when the heaters weren't as stable as they are today. I woke up to cooked gouramis among others. I blamed my cousin Frankie for messing with the heater but to this day (we're 44 and 43) he swears he never touched it.

Sorry for our losses. I would be a mess if this happened to me now.