Every once in a while an emergency pops up. It may be your fish are looking ill or you may lose power to your house for varying lengths of time. Here are a few things that you can keep on hand to prevent that last minute stress of running around trying to find what you need to stave of a potential disaster.

Power Outage

In the unlucky event that you have the power cut to your house there are a couple of small items that come in handy.

For short outages over an hour or two, air is an important factor in keeping your fish alive and healthy. Battery operated air pumps, a length of airline and an air stone is enough to keep the oxygen supply up to your fish. Keeping a couple of spare batteries in the cupboard is always a handy idea as well as batteries have a limited life when installed in an electrical item. Small air pumps can be purchased for under $20 and as a side bonus are great to use when transporting fish. Simply put the fish in the bucket, pop the lid on and poke a small hole in the lid so the airline can go through. Put the airstone on once through the lid and never again will you have any oxygen problems when travelling with your fish.

Generators are a cheap alternative these days and can be bought for under $100. They generally supply enough power to run up to around 750 watts. To put this into perspective, A cannister filter on an ordinary aquarium may consume up to 70 watts. If you have a couple, thats around 140 watts. You may also run your 300 watt heater, your 7-10 watt air pump, a 10 to 20 watt internal filter and still have power supply left over. It is a very effective way of guaranteeing the well being of your aquarium. All you have to do is look at the rating of your generator and add up your components in watts to make sure you are not overly pulling to many watts from the product. I have recently gone through a 2.5 day power outage with a GMC unit purchased at bunnings and it saved my particularly tender bottom from a disaster. Mine runs on two stroke petrol, a tank takes around 1 litre and with that will run for around 8 hours. So your typical 5 litre jerry can will keep you going for a couple of days.

Fish maintenance

Your fish are beginning to gasp or die off. Well as often suggested having water test kits is of major importance as a first step in insuring water quality is ok in your aquarium. Basic test kits include PH,ammonia and nitrates. Ammonia is one of the most common detrimental problems for an aquarium and one of the most common test kits to have on hand. There is an article on these processes so I wont go into them but nitrates are an issue that isn’t tested for nearly enough. It is commonly known as the silent killer as many aquarists only test for ammonia thinking the others are not as common or important. If you are having issues with your fish then I strongly recommend you start with your test kits to get a base reading of where your tank is standing atm.

Fish disease

There are a couple of medications that can be kept in your aquarium arsenal. One of the best and cheapest things to keep handy is salt but be sure it is of the non iodized ones ie NOT table salt. I often go to a hardware shop and buy a huge bag of pool salt for a few dollars. Salt is an excellent product for treating external problems on fish such as minor infections, scrapes and such and is a great all round medication.

There are also a number of medications that are available from your local fish shop. Some are natural like melafix and pimafix. Melafix heals open wounds and abrasions,treats fin and tail rot, eye cloud, mouth fungus and promotes regrowth of damaged fin rays and tissue. Pimafix treats fungal infections and both internal and external bacterial infections. There is also a number of medications that treat such symptoms as Ich, Fluke, velvet, fungus, pop eye, fin rot, ulcers amongst a few. Care should always be taken when using medications and remember quite a few can kill the good bacteria in your filtration so having a fair idea before you treat is always a good idea. Also please check to see if salt is suitable to dose your fish with. Some fish such as Corydoras do not do well with salt medications.

Other Misc

Other bit and pieces that are handy to keep are things like Airline. This is useful for tieing loose things up

Common plumbing parts such as pvc fittings are useful to have if you are running a sump etc

Silicon is always handy for small leaks or for general use on your aquarium.

If you have any other idea, then post them up in the comments…

Chuck