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Tank sitting in DC?


Steve G

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What is a good solution for times when I need to go on a trip. Are there services that will visit the tank and do maintenance and deal with emergencies?

Who is good and how do they price their services? I live in DC near the border w/MD (Takoma/Silver Spring).

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Anyone else have specific experiences or suggestions to share?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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I have a neighbor come to feed my fish since I feed frozen food exclusively. I would likely reach out to a reefing buddy to help my sitter in an emergency (e.g. equipment failure etc). Worst case call a tank service.

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In DC as well, and I travel often.. probably 15 times a year at least for anywhere from 2-20 days. Longest I have gone is about 3 weeks. 

 

I have a ton of redundancy and monitoring on my tank (apex, dual redundancy heaters, leak detectors, extra ATO shut off, etc), as well as automation (auto water changes, feeding, ATO, testing, etc) but the biggest savior has been the Wyze wireless cameras (like $20 each) that I have set up that monitor my tank and sump. I do have a reefing friend who I can call in a pinch, but honestly I only needed someone to check on my tank once while I was away, and it was just to reset an apex module (un-plug, plug it back in), and I walked a non-reefing friend through doing it over FaceTime. Another plus is having a way to remotely allow someone into your house. 

 

While Im sure hiring a service was fine, and I do have one on hand that I can call in an emergency, but I don't trust people I don't know working on my tank without at least some of my oversight.

 

Im happy to help out if needed. 

Edited by ccurnick
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That's a great point from Ccurnick about trying to keep some oversight if somebody is not salt water knowledgeable.

 

I have the equivalent of a small farm of english bulldogs, so the only option is a house sitter for me if I'm going somewhere. I usually portion out frozen food (like wheresthereef I exclusively feed frozen as well) however, my ATO container is only 4 gallons tops. While I left an additional bucket of RO water by the tank, it wasn't enough, and my house sitter thought it was just tap water, an honest mistake, but one that crashed my tank.

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