Central Air problems

A couple of weeks ago at sometime in the night, my fish room blower toasted a bearing.  Not a big deal.  Air pumps being mechanical are going to break down at some point.

I set-up my spare pump and ordered repair parts.  Quick service from a supplier on the west coast and I was due for a Monday delivery.  Life was good…..  for about 2 hours.  My spare pump goes down.

Now don’t you just love it, when you think you’ve covered all the bases and Murphy’s Law comes up and bites you on the butt!  Well at any rate since it was going to be several days before my parts for the blower came in I needed a new plan.  

The fish room basically went into shut down.  I hooked up a very large pump that I’ve kept around for various other jobs and cycled it on and off every few hours to keep my HMFs in good condition. The lights came off the timer and feedings stopped.  I did continue feeding fry and doing large water changes on the fry tanks.

I’m pleased to say that when things got back to normal a few days later I didn’t lose a single fish.  It certainly didn’t hurt matters that just weeks ago I had cleared out the fish room of excess fish and I didn’t have any tanks with high stocking levels.

On the down side, my blower must have over-heated when it toasted the bearing as even after replacing the bearing it would not come up to speed.  The local electric motor repair shop said repairs would exceed replacement cost.

The fish room is back to humming along with a brand spanking new Pondmaster AP-100 pump.  The jury is still out as to what I’m going to get as a back-up.  Now that I have bearings for my old blower I might get another one just like it.  Other than being a bit on the noisy side, I got lots of service out of the old one.