CRASH!

[Scott Fellman]

So, a reader asked me to tackle this one...I hope that I don't come across too...I don't know- "high and might" or what not...I hope that we can have a discussion without too much negativity. I can see the hate mails coming my way...

Let's talk about that dreaded, yet apparently real phenomenon of "tank crashes."

A "tank crash!" Yikes.

Ever had that happen?

Nah, me niether...In fact, I don't know too many people that it happened to. Okay, I suppose I can qualify this. I've heard a bunch of people claim things like tanks "crashing" as a result of some sort of technological failure, such as a heater failing join the "on" position and cooking their livestock, or the cleaning lady accidentally spraying household disinfectant over the open-top reef aquarium. Or hurricanes, off-premises power failures, etc.

But the reality is, a real "crash"- the kind people talk about on discussion forums, is almost always generally attributable to one thing, IMHO- failure on the part of the hobbyist. Yeah, it sounds like I'm being kind of arrogant, but it's true..."Anomalous" crashes are usually caused by our own errors. Aquariums tend to NOT just "crash" without our "assistance"- and that's a kind of cold, hard fact. Not a shot at anyone who's had such a problem, but the reality is, you probably did something, like overstocked, overfed, failed to engage in regular maintenance, etc...and the cumulative affect of these things resulted in a failure. It's important to accept this because we can LEARN from these things.

I personally hate when I see forum posts where a hobbyist will essentially blame some factor for the cause of the disaster...as if it was something that happened without any involvement in the situation whatsoever, and no real attempt to learn from it. Just a desire to complain....Urghh.

Common "crashes" are usually attributable to stuff like a bioload that is simply too great for the filtration capacity of the tank in question. Perhaps it was a case of "too much, too soon"- you ramped up the population to a "well established" level, yet only in the first few weeks of the tank's life. Or maybe, you simply added too many heavy-metabolic waste-producing fishes at one time, overwhelming the capacity of the filter again, resulting in a deadly ammonia "spike" that killed your fishes.

Okay, fine, you had a disaster. If you examine what occurred, and you learned that it was something you could have prevented, and haven't repeated it, than the awful tragedy was something that had some educational "value" to it. It may seem hard to reconcile when innocent animals die, but you can at least say that their deaths helped prevent future tragedies from occurring. Cliched, but true. Don't beat yourself up over this.

The point of this "analysis" of the idea of a "tank crash" is not to deliver a beatdown to anyone...It's just to keep us all honest...Tanks don't simply crash for no particular reason. They just don't. We have to accept that. Algae problems, environmental fluctuations- all have root causes in stuff that WE started- or failed to stop! No shame in that. None of us is perfect. We've all made mistakes, and we will continue to make them.

We just need to admit that perhaps we were wrong, and that we can LEARN from it.

So, who has had a "crash" before....and what do you think the cause was? What did you learn from the experience.

So, stay positive. Stay open minded.

Stay wet.

Scott Fellman

 

[FL_Reefer]

Spot on in my opinion Scott. I've never dealt with a ''crash'' before but it's almost always our fault.

 

[twilliard]

Indeed Scott agreed.
I have had 3 "crashes" over the last 8 years.
All of my own fault to detail.

 

[saltyhog]

Agree. Even the "crashes" that seem to be out of our control like power outages sometimes are lethal only because we didn't have a plan!

 

[Mike in CT]

I would like to comment about this, but I don't like tempting fate..... Lol

 

[Salty1962]

So true Scott. I crashed a tank a few years ago by adding too much vodka for my carbon dosing. Created a bacterial bloom that took out most of my fish and quite few corals by robbing oxygen from my tank. Needless to say, I don't carbon dose vodka anymore. Live and learn.

 

[Scott Fellman]

I think everyone is taking a very "mature" attitude about this.

The point was not to bash anyone who's screwed up. I screw up all the time. We all do. The point is for us to gain some benefit out of awful occurrences like a crash...It was common, oh, about 10 years ago, for reefers on forums to attribute any failure to "a bad batch of salt", or "phosphate remover", or whatever...You still see this attitude on forums, and I think it's time that we simply look in the mirror once in a while and understand that nobody is perfect, and that we gain far more from being critical of our own foibles than we do from simply "lashing out" and grasp for straws to assign blame to just about anything but our own actions. The greater good of the hobby is served when we take the time to study what went wrong, understand what we could have done- and could do in the future- to prevent such problems, and take actions...and of course, to share what we've learned with others. Then, and only then, can we honestly say that seemingly tired, but objectively true line, "My fishes and corals didn't die in vain."

Doesn't make it any easier. It DOES make it better.

Scott

 

[ScottMyers123]

Great topic, I feel as humans when something goes wrong in the tank it is just easier to place blame on something else. Instead of realizing 90 percent of the time it was something I did to cause the issue. Live and learn (Hopefully)

 

[revhtree Verified Admin]

Agreed! Great topic!

Not to knock anyone who has had "crash" but like Scott said, there is always a reason and normally it could have been prevented!

 

[Naiad]

You are correct. My tank just crashed and it was totally my fault. I was not specific enough with the instructions left for the person helping me care for my tank while I deal with my health. Something smallish that overtime built up to cause catastrophic failure.

 

[Bruce Burnett]

never had a total crash, partial crash but I never looked at it as a crash but let me figure out what I did wrong or overlooked to have that fish or coral die.

 

[luisgo]

Even the sea crashes!! Look at the Great Barrier Reef..

 

[Lynn52]

Only had this happen once. Several years ago my 4 year old grand daughter "fed the fish" with out telling anybody. A whole can of flakes and nobody saw it till morning as the tank was in the basement and then it was the smell that alerted me. Now all tanks are upstairs where I can see them and monitor the health of everything daily and all supplies and equiptment is out of sight.

 

[Jonathan Dignon]

Left me reef in my brothers hands a fuew years ago when i moved from long island new York to atlanta. Needless to say hurricane sandy stranded him without power or heat for a month and he managed to keep that tank going with a cordless drill with a paint stirrer and with temps going below 40 would heat tank water on a propane burner. Thats love all crashes are avoidable just how far you wanna go.

 

[Quah]

I experienced my first and only crash about 6 months into the hobby (been in it about 3 years). I attribute this failure to the use of a DSB and not being informed on how to maintain it. I stirred it up and everything died.

 

[aquaman67]

I experienced my first and only crash about 6 months into the hobby (been in it about 3 years). I attribute this failure to the use of a DSB and not being informed on how to maintain it. I stirred it up and everything died.

Ouch

 

[o2manyfish]

Sadly I have suffered several crashes over the decades. And while they all had a huge cost, whether emotional, financial or ecological hopefully you learn how not to let it happen again, and share that knowledge to protect someone else.

Crashes over the years:
1) Was feeding raw shrimp from the market to Fish only tank with a collection of rare eels. All eels died overnight and all fish followed the next day - Turns out the shrimp was tainted. Some humans who had purchased from the market got very ill - The settlement from the supermarket was enough to buy a nice used car.
2) Had multiple tanks connected outside in the yard. The tanks sat on top of tomato bins filled with rock, water and chaeto. Had some hair algae get out of control. Hair algae actually grew up the side of the tomato bin and over the exterior edge. It looked kind of like a girls hair in a pony tail. The algae was pulling water up to keep itself moist from the bin. It was a neat thing to watch grow. Then it continued to grow down the outside of the tomato bin. The algae ended up creating a siphon that was pulling water out of the bin over the edge and down the outside. Wasn't till the system topoff converted the system from salt to fresh that I discovered what nature was capable of doing.
3) When I initially installed my surge tank I put the pump that pumps the water up to the second story balcony in the back of the display tank. I came home from my sisters wedding at 2am. The tank had about 6" of water in the bottom, with 20+ inches of acros out of the water baking under the halides. A rat had knocked the top off the surge tank (3/4" thick piece of acrylic, had fallen into the surge tank, got sucked into the pipe and stuck. The pump just kept pumping water out of the tank and up on the balcony
4) Did a tank upgrade from a 360 to 400. Had all the local reefers come over and help in a fun picnic/bbq kind of atmosphere. Managed to move a 100+ fish and a couple of hundred corals out of the tank, swap tanks, and then put everything back in without any major losses. We sat back at the end of the day appreciating out accomplishment. And while we gazed at the tank one of the Xlrg clams ejected a huge cloud into the tank.... The clam had spawned. we were all so thrilled. At the time I had over a dozen nice sized clams in my display tank. And in my attached outdoor tanks I was using giant clams as a natural filtration method. Well it turns out once one clam spawns, the others notice and then they all start to spawn. Within an hour we had seen about 3 clams follow suit spawning into the water. The next morning the system water was grey. The spawning of all the clams had overwhelmed the system. The skimmer had turned into a foam machine of chunky grey foam. The clam spawn wiped out about 65% of the tank population.
5) Decided to resurface the floor in the fish room and put in a stained concrete floor. We carefully plastic wrapped and sealed the tank in the room because we were going to be grinding and sanding the concrete. A couple of days into the job late in the day dark foam starts to come out of the plastic wrap around the tank --- Way up high by the ceiling. We pulled open the plastic to find the tank filled with grey water. I went outside to find all the attached tanks foaming with grey foam. And the water was grey silt. Turns out one of the laborers working on the project had taken the wet/dry vac full of concrete dust and dumped it into the outside sump thinking it was a trash can. That laborer became mulch in my yard and the next season the fruit trees turned out some of the most amazing fruit ever. Not only was this a horrible disaster. But there was so much silt in the system that it took months and months of huge water changes and cleaning till the system was able to maintain stable parameters and could start be stocked again (maybe 10 months)
6) Most recent (2.5 years ago) - Wife comes downstairs at 3am to take the dogs out. Sees the tank water is white. She sees 100+ fish lined up dead across the front of the tank. Auto topoff failure. Had a float switch and a second backup float switch - Both failed and the system topped off with Kalk for 7 hours straight. 85% of the livestock was dead immediately. We had a huge population of softies though - Thousands and thousands of zoas. And tons of xenia - And when I say tons - I mean 2 tanks outside that had probably 15+ square feet of xenia and about 6 sq feet of xenia inside. The softies took weeks to slowly keep melting and dying off. I immediately realized that this crash could have been avoided with 2 extra lines of code in my Apex programming. I emailed some of my fish friends with big systems and Apex units and said please please please add these two lines of code to your topoff. Within 6 months those two lines of code saved 2 tanks from the same disaster.

Sadly in this hobby "Feces Happens" and there is little we can do but learn and try to prevent it from happening again to ourselves or anyone else.

Dave B

 

[Mike in CT]

o2manyfish,
Dang, those are some battle wounds! Congrats for hanging in there!

 

[brandon151413]

I dont know if mine is a crash. somehow all coral, even the xenia wont opened. did a major water change and crossing by finger. trying to build my new fish tank 210 gal but my small tanks keep getting in the way

 

[Naiad]

Left me reef in my brothers hands a fuew years ago when i moved from long island new York to atlanta. Needless to say hurricane sandy stranded him without power or heat for a month and he managed to keep that tank going with a cordless drill with a paint stirrer and with temps going below 40 would heat tank water on a propane burner. Thats love all crashes are avoidable just how far you wanna go.

I had a 55 reef during the east cost black out. Only lost one coral. But it took a lot to keep going after 3 days no power lots of props to your brother. My other 2 crashes where accidents contaminated water and equipment failure. They could have been avoided for sure and have resulted in me changing how I do things in this hobby.