Inside Ultimate Aquatics in Heugh Road, the hum of generators has become constant at night, keeping hundreds of tanks alive as tropical fish, goldfish and ornamental species depend on oxygen pumps, with the owner having to sleep at his shop to keep his business alive.
Gqeberha tropical fish breeder Chris Rautenbach said ongoing electricity outages were threatening his livelihood.
He has been forced to sleep at the shop to monitor the situation, while running generators at a high cost.
He said the financial strain and repeated generator use were becoming unsustainable for his 24-year-old business as he tries to prevent large-scale losses.
“We are retailers in tropical fish, goldfish and ornamental fish, and they need the pumps to be running to give them oxygen to stay alive.”
He said there had been several power outages this year.
“Every time it has been off for a minimum of a week.”
So far, it is the third time in 2026 that a damaged pylon has caused a widespread outage.
“I don’t know how long we are going to be off for. We do not have any rotational power whatsoever.”
“I’m running a generator, which I have to feed with fuel.
“They aren’t designed to run like this, so you need to nurture the thing.
“I try to switch it off for an hour a day to let it rest again, and then I fill it up with another 50l of petrol a day.
“So it costs me R1,000 a day to keep it running.”
“Fish breathe at night, too, and they naturally deplete the oxygen, so we have to keep it going at night.
“If the biological filter doesn’t get air 24/7, it dies, and then the water also goes vrot and then the fish ultimately die.
“Luckily, we are in summer now, so we don’t need heaters yet, but last year, when it happened in winter, we had to power the heaters too.
“If we don’t have power for six hours, we will lose all our stock.”
Rautenbach said he’d had to sleep in his shop since the most recent pylon collapse to ensure the tanks were running.
“I have to wake up at all crazy times of the night to switch the generator on.
“I thought there was going to be power with the load rotation, so I would have to set alarms to switch over from the generator, but it hasn’t happened yet.
“If I don’t do this, my livelihood and my stock will die, and I will have to close the doors.
“Customers, like hobbyists, don’t always have generators, so if they lose their fish, they give up the hobby, and there is another customer gone.
“So in the long run, you are losing customers and people aren’t coming back at all.”
Rautenbach said that in the 24 years he had run Ultimate Aquatics, unreliable electricity supply had been a persistent challenge.
“It has become a normal thing, but now it is extreme.
“The other times it would go off for half a day or two days, but now it is completely devastating.
“I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to last.
“There’s no two ways about it, without power, I have got to stay here permanently.”
