We have a wind and rain storm tonight in San Francisco, and it got me thinking: is it worth the money to have an uninterruptable power supply on a main tank?

On my 55G, one (of two) heaters and the filter running off a battery backup would consume about 225 watts of power. So a decent sized backup could go from 1 to 3 hours, depending upon the room temp and how much the heater had to run. But those backups aren't cheap.

Thanks!

I wouldn't think it would be necessary if you only get 1 to 3 hours out of it, unless you are powering something like an egg tumbler that can't go that long with no power.

We've had a handful of power outages that go for several hours and tumbling eggs was the only thing I lost. As long as the filter stays wet, it should be okay and you shouldn't lose too much heat in that period of time.

Last winter we had a 44 hour outage in freezing cold weather where my tank temps dropped into the mid 50s and I only lost 2 small fish. I made sure the filter material was wet, covered the tanks with blankets which helped for a while, and hoped for the best. By the second day the temperatures really started to drop - I didn't think they were going to survive. They were a lot tougher than I would have believed. My filter bacteria seemed to have survived as well because I noticed no ill effects.

We did lose everything in our refrigerator and some in the freezer as well. Last week we went out and bought a generator. Good Job