Sheesh! I came home from my girls house last night to a problem child. I walked in the front door, and I could hear the pumps in the back of my tank starving for water! Dagnabit!! I bolted to my room and took a look at what was going on. The water level in the tank was good but the overflow and pump chambers were near empty!
I had this happen once before when I was using the two large sponges that come with the pod. They had sort of gotten gunked up a little bit with the cycling tank ooze. When it happened that time, I cleaned the sponges and only replaced one of them. I put it sort of far down the overflow so water woud "drop" onto it. This worked great until last night.
What I think is happening is that due to evap and the sponges getting sort of full of gak the tank can compensate for a while, but eventually the rate of flow of the pump overcomes the rate of flow from the tank into the filter chamber and the pumps starve for water. The bizzare thing is the compensatory nature of the system. It sort of hides itself from you until it crashes.
What did I do? Well, I cleaned the sponge and then opened one more of the "flood gates" that the aquapod offers. Previously I only had one opened up. This radically increased the flow of the water into the filter chamber and now both the pump side and the filter side are nearly full of water. The real kicker to me was that in the end I had been running the system several liters low on salt water (yes it was salt, i checkd the sg of the water to make sure I was not just needing to add fresh)!
Anyone else have this happen with an aquapod??
reefmo.
24 Gallon Aquapod Blog
Tank Specs (sorta weak)
