A Funny Mishap....

[Saldarya]

I thought I would share a funny mishap with you this evening as most of you can appreciate this more than any random friends I have.

Over the weekend I set up Float valves and Auto shut offs from my RO/DI units to the water reservoirs that I run all my misters off of. In essence I never have to full the 40 gallon containers by hand again. Not only is this convenient, but since I travel and am gone many days at a time, it allows me to extend misting times and not have to worry about the containers running dry.

So I get this all done and I think "Now I can mist the parsons for 1hr+ at a time" and as a results increase the mistking timer.

I have to leave town on Sunday night so I dont sleep well kind of worried what happens if the valve doesn't shut off, but luckily this morning my wife has no flood to report so all is good.

This afternoon my daughter gets home and I have her check the chameleon building to make sure the water is topping off. She walks in and tells me, "There is water everywhere...". Dammit! I think. I have her go and check the water reservoir and it is not overflowing, it is empty!!! WTH!!

I have her unplug the pumps and such and now it is time to do a 'systems' check with an impatient 15 year teenager on the phone standing in water and me wondering what the hell happen.

Well after it is clear there are no leaks, and the reservoir is still filling up, I get to having her check the timers, and that is when I found my fatal mistake....

The mist king timer for some of my "Like lots of water' chameleons used to be set for 12:10PM until 12:40 PM, I wanted to change the end time to 1:00PM, so before I left town on Sunday night I changed the minutes from :40 to :00, of course, I never changed the hours from 12: to 1:. So the timer was set from 12:10 Pm to 12Pm the next day.......

Point is, my Parsons got a long and healthy 4.5 hour drink of water.......

Although they are now very hydrated, the moral of the story is to always double check your timer settings and learn to have patience with teenage daughters.........Especially when you are trying to teach them to use a wet vac over the phone..........

 

[Sanababit]

the same to me, but it was only 5 gallons of water, it was at night so woke up to 5 gallons of water on the floor

Sana

 

[Carlton]

Even though programmable timers have changed my exotics-keeping life for the better, I still HATE and DREAD programming them!!!!!

 

[nick barta]

I travel too, so I always make timer changes when I am still in town, as I had 30 gallons of water greet me on my trip return.

It seems laminate flooring does buckle up with excessive water!

CHEERS!

Nick

 

[frankpayne32]

Good for you for sharing! I don't know anyone that keeps aquariums or runs misters that hasn't flooded the house at least once.

 

[distortionz]

Thank you for making this thread.

I'm glad to see unfortunately every one makes this mistake I thought I was the only idiot lol.. mine happened to be with 4 week olds though.. don't judge me lol.... I got my first mist king last week and was in heaven.. I programmed it and watched it work all day long until I left for work at 4:30 pm. The last misting was to be at 6:30 pm. Well the next morning I got home to a whole 5 gallon bucket drained on my floor and wet cages.. At this point I'm like wtf? This is the first day I had it.. At first I though I didn't tighten the fitting on the 5 gallon bucket enough and set the on times too long.. then I realized when I programmed it I set 6 timers and instead of hitting clock to close out I hit program again then I hit clock.. Well when I hit program it set it to kick on at 12am with no off time... I don't know how long it would take to empty a 5 gallon bucket but it was on that long... and my carpet was drenched..

Automated misters are gifts from the gods, but they don't fix human error. Yeah I'm an idiot

 

[laurie]

I fit in so perfect with this thread. I am well know in the house and to all my phone cham buddies to have more water problems than you can believe. I am not trusted to set, change or touch the mist king controller but still I can create water disasters. Some of my fun has included, forgot to hook the hose to the drainage system, had a cage sitting off the tray about an inch. My all time best, I wanted to up misting a bit. I can control anything in my cham room from my phone, I can also check any of it, keep that in mind, I turned the fill value on the system and let it go. Go it did, it ran the 5 gal drain bucket over and was merrily coming over the side of the bucket the next Morning!! I yelled for David who fixed it all. There is a reason I had a custom room build downstairs just for my chams. Except for the clean up, there was no harm done. I could have several inches of water on the floor before it could leave the room. But the room is getting too small - how do I tell David that?? This one was promised by me to be all I would need.

 

[absolutbill]

I also had an R/O flood a few years ago, but it was due to an aquarium, not chams. And, of course it was New Year's Eve, about 8PM when we returned home to about 100 gallons of water throughout the house destroying our hardwood floors. It was just a faulty valve, and the insurance came through for us, but we walked around on the concrete slab for about 8 months...

As a PS to this story, 2 weeks after our new beautiful floors were installed we rescued our first dog - a boxer whose nails destroyed all the floors due to the softness of the wood and her weight

 

[Montium]

It seems that automated systems, while making life easier, always have a story lol. I'm glad mine is outside. The only problem I have had with it was a check valve go stuck and didn't fill. So the chams went without water for a day.