All Gone :(

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If I had been home or even just at work things would have been fine. I do have a generator just have to get home to get it up and running. I've had outages where it took my almost 6 hrs til I could get home and get the generator running and not lost anything. 2 1/2 days was just too much though.

that link that you had would be a great start, its very cheap and does give you a small amount of free power. A few of those paralleled together would help. Battery storage is one of our biggest problems when working on UPS systems. And trust me, we spend massive amounts of time and millions of dollars on back up energy systems at my contracts that I have.

That's what I was thinking. Three of those in Parallel should be enough to keep a pair of deep cycles charged up for several days of run time to run at least one vortech at 50% power. Ebay seems to have several very reasonably priced options for charge controllers as well.

I know nothing about electricity, would the solar panel above be wired directly to a water pump or would it be wired to a battery?

RB, I probably already answered this above but the panels would be connected via a charge controller to batteries. The batterys would then power the pump. I'm planning to just use the 12v from the batteries directly to the 12v backup input on my vortech. However if you wanted you could use an inverter and upconvert to 120v and run almost anything that you wanted. Thinking now if you wanted that to fail over automatically you would have to do some more wiring though. Something would have to switch you to battery power, which could be a simple relay I guess but it would take more work and you wouldn't have as much run time.

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It's probably going to be awhile before I can get started on putting the solar back system into place.

Money is a bit tight right now and I really won't have much of anything I need to protect for a couple months as I probably won't even put any fish back into the display until fall.