I tripped a breaker

[Paul B]

So I am sitting in my basement watching my fish as they were watching me and all of a sudden the lights go out. I was an electrician for 40 years and I can count on one hand how many times my circuit breaker tripped in my house while I was not doing anything like leaf blowing, arc welding or running some heavy equipment. So I look around and I was mixing up some saltwater and in that 30 gallon tub I have a powerhead and 3 heaters.
So before I turn back the breaker I figured it must be one of the heaters. It's always a heater. So I lift one and it is fine, I lift the second one and it is fine. Then I remove the third one and it is all black and scurvy inside and it is full of water. As I am looking for a crack on the glass, it dawned on me. The crack wasn't in the glass, it was in my head. That heater was "not" a submersible heater. It used to have a bracket on the side to hang it on the side of the tank. Like Duh. I have like 8 heaters and I just pick out a few, plug them in and throw them in a tub of water. I should have realized it wasn't submersible when it floated. I even got a big 1/2' nut and rubber banded it to the thing to keep it underwater.
It's just great getting old.
So now I have a spare, large test tube that I can make a really small Nano tank out of

 

[TanksNStuff]

Doh! Sometimes we completely ignore the suttle hints that nature gives us, eh? I think the biggest problem is we do things (successfully) for so long that sometimes we don't even think that there might be an issue to worry about avoiding. We just assume that we know what we're doing and kind of coast through it mindlessly. I find myself doing some dumb things like that all the time.

For instance, I had a really nice $300 waterproof camera that I got for my birthday. I used it for over a year for things like snorkeling, taking pictures of and in my tank, etc. without an issue. I had to have taken at least 300-400 pictures under water with that thing. I loved it mostly because I could stick it in the tank and get some really nice closeup shots of my corals.

Well, one day I was taking a bunch of shots of a new frag I had just gotten and then dried off the camera and put in the usb cable to download the new shots to my computer. I reviewed them all and realized my white balance wasn't as good as it should be so I decided to try again after changing some settings. So I unplug it from the computer, make my adjustments, and stick it back in the tank for the new shots. Instantly, the LCD screen goes black and before I even realized what had happened I knew exactly what I did wrong. I never closed the rubber grommet around the USB plug on the camera!

One brief second of stupidity and the thing was ruined forever.

 

[Paul B]

I hate when that happens. That's a bummer.
That heater was from my freshwater days and was kind of old. I even have older ones that worked by steam. I still find marbles in my tank as some of that stuff has been in my tank from when it was freshwater in the 50s and 60s. Remember my tank was not started as salt. It was fresh, then I added salt and it was brackish, then saltwater fish came out and I added more salt to make it a reef. If I look under my gravel I may find some 45s from Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons. Probably "Big Girls Don't Cry" or one of the other top tens.

 

[Zippy69]

Well if you should go a digging......and just so happen to find an Atari game cartridge entitled; " ET the extraterrestrial". You may be on to some salt water gold. This was the worst game and the down fall of Atari. Translation= worth a lot of bucks

 

[Paul B]

I had a Fairchild game which came out just before Arari and was really archaic. It had "Pong" and little else.