Oscars

[Fool]

Question:
I have 2 four inch Oscars, Male and female, 8 inch tin foil barb, 16 inch pleco, and a pictus cat fish in one tank, and in the other i have another paired oscars same size and 2 tin foil barbs 3 inches. My concern is if the power goes out for a couple days. with out electricity what can i do to insure my fish survive. keep in mind i cant run out and buy state of the art battery powered equipment.

FOOL

 

[simonas]

put towels artound the tank and pop bottles of hot tap water floating in the tank water

 

[rdd1952]

The ways mentioned work fine. You just need a way to heat the water for the bottles. If you have a gas water heater, problem solved. On the good side, water holds temperature very well so if you simply wrap the tank and cover it good, the temp shouldn't drop too quickly.

 

[england]

that sounds like some nice fish , how do you know there male and female , at four inches ive never heard of oscars breeding at this age, but maybe its possible, some pictures would be nice please,we love oscars

 

[pica_nuttalli]

also, they sell battery powered air pumps that you can keep on hand in order to keep the tanks aerated.

 

[waterdrop]

The ways mentioned work fine. You just need a way to heat the water for the bottles. If you have a gas water heater, problem solved. On the good side, water holds temperature very well so if you simply wrap the tank and cover it good, the temp shouldn't drop too quickly.

RDD points the way. As he says, any gas equipment that still works helps solve the heat problem. If a gas water heater still works you have hot water for your floating plastic bottle heat sources. If not the water heater, then maybe a gas stove top and you can heat water for the bottles (don't overshoot!) If not either of these, then how about having some charcoal and a lighter ready for your backyard grill. You could heat your water on a kettle there.

And insulation is important -- blankets (be careful about blankets, water and elec turning back on though!) will help but here again, if you are truly concerned you could do a sort of arts&crafts project to plan ahead.. don't they have sheets of styrofoam in those crafts shops? You could construct a tight fitting styrofoam "house" to fit around the bulk of your tank. It might be a little tricky to figure out how to place the pieces and hold them together, but that would -really- hold the heat in a long time! Of course this assumes you've got shed or attic space to hold the pieces when not in use.

Yet another thing good to plan for or just know about is the method you will use to manually exchange the water in your filter. If you have a cannister with hoses you can plan to pull the output tube from up at the tank above the cannister down to a bucket below the cannister and then open the stops to let tank water make one exchange into the cannister box. Then stop the valves and return the water in the bucket to the tank. Doing this once every few hours will keep your bacteria alive during the power outage even if it goes for a long time.

~~waterdrop~~