I believe in the short term flow is your biggest concern, last year I lost a flame angel after only a couple hours without power. The temperature had not yet dropped significantly in the tank.
Also hopefully you all have suction breaks on the plumbing from your sump so that when the power goes out you will not have a flood. A suction break can be as simple as a hole drilled in the return plumbing just below the water level in your tank, test to insure when your pump is shut down and water starts siphoning back to the sump that this hole will draw air and break the siphon before your sump is full, can be scary the first time . . .I remember standing there chanting, please stop, please stop and it did!
Some of the tricks I remember reading about last year if you do not have a generator or some other means to run some of the equipment on your tank:
For flow :
Use a jug and pull out water and pour back in the tank, not sure how often this would need to be done it seems some people last year kept themselves warm through this chore.
For heat:
Wrap tank with a blanket, sleeping bag or insulating foam board to conserve the heat that is already in it.
One guy posted that he mixed de-icer with water in a milk jug after remember how warm the chemical reaction was and floated the jug in his tank.
I hope others will add their ideas or any tricks they recall being used last year. I am sure many who did not have reef tanks during last year storms haven't spent a lot of time thinking about how to keep everything alive in case of extended power outages.
I have a couple of generators I use and fortunately made it through last years storms without loss except for that flame angel. The power had went off just a couple hours before I needed to get up anyway and I thought everything would be fine, but it wasn't. Now I do not wait, when the power goes out I get the generator running, hopefully before long I will have a bigger generator that will run the whole house and auto start, for now I have a generator that is hooked into 6 circuits in the house and we move critical tank componants to run off those curcuits (one of those curcuits is the one with the pumps for my big tank, so I do not have to move much on that tank). The second generator is a smaller (and quieter) unit we use to run a pump and heater on each tank over night-It is hard to sleep with the big generrator running as it is right underneath our bedroom window (who planned that??)
