Funniest rookie mistakes

[Homebrewer]

I’ll play, but it’s a little bit of a downer. No idea what a flatworm infestation looked like and by the time I realized that I was overrun, I was OVERRUN! Used Flatworm Exit (which is an excellent product), but didn’t follow the directions exactly. Woke up to a tank with a bunch of dead fish. To this day it bothers me so much because it was totally preventable if I had just paid attention.

If there is a silver lining, it’s that I research the heck out of everything before making any change in what I do in this hobby.

 

[chadg]

Ok, so a 72gal bow front and a 45 gal tall hex tank in the living room. It was a week after Xmas. Tree still up, all the opened presents still under the tree, hardwood floors.......

I needed to do some kind of deep clean in the 45, I forget why. So, I setup my 20 gal long in the room, fill it with the water from the 45 and move all the fish and a few soft corals to it. No problem. Hummm, that cheep butt wheel on the stand drilled into the press board looks a little crooked? No big deal, I'll run down and get a piece of wood to put under it. No emergency......

Well half way down the basement stairs and I hear CRASH! Kids, my wife the dog all going crazy. I run up there, glass, water, fish, coral everywhere! Under the Xmas tree! Oh, boy. I'm just really glad the 72 was up and running I did manage to scoop up all the fish and get them in there. Everyone survived. Man, what a mess to clean up!

 

[MombasaLionfish]

Ok, so a 72gal bow front and a 45 gal tall hex tank in the living room. It was a week after Xmas. Tree still up, all the opened presents still under the tree, hardwood floors.......

I needed to do some kind of deep clean in the 45, I forget why. So, I setup my 20 gal long in the room, fill it with the water from the 45 and move all the fish and a few soft corals to it. No problem. Hummm, that cheep butt wheel on the stand drilled into the press board looks a little crooked? No big deal, I'll run down and get a piece of wood to put under it. No emergency......

Well half way down the basement stairs and I hear CRASH! Kids, my wife the dog all going crazy. I run up there, glass, water, fish, coral everywhere! Under the Xmas tree! Oh, boy. I'm just really glad the 72 was up and running I did manage to scoop up all the fish and get them in there. Everyone survived. Man, what a mess to clean up!

Yikes scary I'm glad everyone made it out ok.

 

[tony'stank]

Back in 1989 I went on vacation in the Bahamas. I impulsively decided to bring a piece of live rock home with me. I packaged in plastic bags from the gift shop and packed in my carry on bag. The plastic bags leaked and it shorted out the X-ray conveyer belt. I had lot of embarrassing explaining to do with the Bahamian airport officials

 

[sfairtx]

Salt water in my ATO. Fun times.

 

[dvlpr]

Just got into the hobby about 1.5 years ago because my daughter was given a small FW betta tank. I upped it up a bit (to probably 30 liters) and was doing weekly changes.

First, I'd catch the betta and the couple of tetras we had in there and place them in a small container (I can now see how much stress they endured just from that) ;Nailbiting for the actual water change.

Then, one day, I forgot to dechlorinate the water and topped up 25% with pure tap water . Luckily, I was watching parameters almost every day and caught up on ammonia quickly - all bacteria was dead. An expensive exercise in terms of rushing out to buy live bacteria, dumping in and hoping for the best. All 3 fish survived and were later moved to the 240l FW tank I got...

Many lessons learnt, but now with my first SW tank cycling, I'm thinking what else I can do wrong on a larger scale

 

[SRQreefer]

We live near Sarasota Bay in Florida and as my kids got older, we would occasionally net hermit crabs and local snails/conchs to supplement the cleaning crew. We would always do the research first, and it was a fun way to engage the kids with the hobby. So, one summer day while I am at work, there is some kind of massive sea hair migration and my young, enthusiastic son “does the research,” finds out they eat algae and decides to go hog wild. He nets like a dozen of these ugly monstrosities and drops them all in. Well, turns out they ink and chaos ensues. Collapsed rock work in the sea hair removal effort, chemistry whacked, etc. LFS came through with a bunch of extra buckets of water for a massive change water and everything turned out ok. But, some new rules were imposed....

 

[Indytraveler83]

Okay, I'll play:

I had just gotten my CPR backpack skimmer (HOB skimmer) running, and it was tossing microbubbles like CRAZY into the tank, driving me nuts. So on the return chamber of the skimmer, I placed a couple of thick pads of carbon filter material to help keep bubbles from entering the display.

Well... I'm sitting in the living room watching TV, and suddenly the power goes out. I flick it back on, and horrible noises start coming from the room the tank is in. I run in, and the 54 gallon tank is about 1/4 empty. The carbon pads had shifted right against the outlet on the skimmer blocking it, causing the water to pour over the back of the skimmer.

To make matters worse, I'd allowed my power strip to lay on the ground UNDER THE SKIMMER along with the ballast from the T5 fixture. The ballast had partially melted, and the power strip was throwing sparks and electrical arcs between it and the ballast.

All told, I had about 15 gallons of saltwater in the carpet, a ruined T5, a ruined powerstrip and a burnt out skimmer pump. I'm just glad the power went out when it did... had scorch marks on the wall behind the tank too!

 

[Zsolt Molnar]

Back in the early 90’s I used to work in the local fish store. There was a guy who used to come in to buy some expensive salt water fish every week for $300-$400 at the time. This went on for about a good two months or so. Finally one day I asked him how big is your aquarium? He replied. Not that big it’s about 120 gallon but the fish never seems to live long in my tank. I finally asked him if he wanted us to come and test the water and maybe look at his equipment and find out what the problem might be. The next day I showed up only to find out after testing the water that he never actually put salt in the water when he filled up the tank. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry.

 

[pgravis]

Biggest mistake...told my wife I’d be content with a 60 gallon! Hear about it any time I bring up changing things around!

 

[bryanfuel]

My first tank was a 20G long with a zebra moray, 2 clown fish and 2 raccoon butterfly fish. I can an aquaclear HOB filter and a hamster tube for the eel .

 

[Reefer Reboot]

Back in my crazy college days (1980S) I had a FOWLR tank with a psychotic porcupine puffer fish. This fish loved to bite anything he could. A bunch of friends were over drinking beers and someone came up with the great idea of daring others to stick their hands in the tank and let the puffer bite them. Well, college age + beers + dares means somebody just has to do it, right?! So Mr. Brave steps up to the challenge. In goes his hand. Puffy charges across the tank and chomps down on a finger, HARD! Then the most hilarious, guttural, girly scream ever comes from this big guy as he's shaking his hand trying to get Puffy off. Of course Puffy don't wanna let go. So he whips his hand out of the tank with Puffy, now fully inflated, still hanging on. As he shakes his hand in a complete panic attack, Puffy comes loose and flies across the room like a spikey mace ball. He lands squarely into the lap of one of the other guys. This was one of those times when you just wish you had a camera. Now this guys flies into a panic, jumps up and sends Puffy rolling back across the room. I grabbed Puffy and plopped him back in the tank where he just charges back and forth across the front of the tank, gnashing his teeth, looking like some crazed creature from a horror show. To this day, whenever I see any of these guys, that is one of the first things they will reminisce about. That day all of us rookies learned a lesson, DON'T MESS WITH PUFFY!!!

 

[Pablopufferfish]

One time in my first tank, my large striped hermit was looking for new shell(I had plenty so I didn’t worry). So instead the striped hermit killed a hermit of similar size and stole that hermit’s shell. I witnessed this all and I took the body of dead hermit and tried to shove him back into a shell. Since I thought it looked alive and thought it could still eat algae. Looking back that is probably the most newbie thing I have ever done.

 

[Victor_C3]

Not really a newbie mistake as I had been in the hobby for 2 years when I messed up my system.

I went to a big-name LFS in Baltimore/Washington DC and bought the best part of $500 in SPS corals to put into my 30 gallon tank. Of course I didn’t quarantine them or dip them or anything. After the corals had been in my tank for a few days I noticed red bugs on everything.

We had two dogs at the time so I had Interceptor on hand. I did my research and removed every last invertebrate from my tank and put them into 3 gallon plastic container with a heater. It didn’t occur to me to add a powerhead or a bubbler for gas exchange.

I went to bed and when I woke up in the morning, nearly all of my invertebrates had died. To further add to the death toll, I found out that I had three Acropora crabs living in my corals that I never knew existed. Of course, I murdered those guys too with interceptor.

The good news is I got rid of the red bugs! It’s really not daunting of a tasks. I’m not even sure the LFS that I bought the infected corals from is still in business, this all happened back in 2008.

 

[New&no clue]

Tried to fix a small salinity issue. Tank was 1.024 and trying to bring it up to 1.025 by doing a water change with salt mixed at 1.028. I drained a gallon, went to the basement to get the saltwater, poured in... tested again still 1.024. Repeat the process... test again and now 1.023??? Oh yeah, turn of the ATO ;Facepalm .

 

[Rjmul]

There's a ton. The worst mistake was when I let the drawstring on a media bag hang out the back of an aquaclear on my brackish tank.
Noticed it, thought yeah that's fine. Went to sleep. Woke up at 2am in a panic for what I thought was no reason smelled fire. The drawstring was wicking water out of the tank into the power strip. Arcing everywhere. power strip melting. I fixed it and just laid in bed and stared at the ceiling for a long while. Never told my wife

 

[Rjmul]

Oh and I spent 120 dollars on pods today.

 

[tnyr5]

Well, there was the time with my old tank when I had the return pump's plumbing unhooked while I was face-up under the stand, moved a pipe, bumped the power switch with the pipe, sprayed water in my face, smacked my head off the top of the stand, and as I was flailing for the power switch, knocked the skimmate cup off the skimmer and dumped it on my face. That was a difficult day.

 

[Sebastian the Lionfish]

There's a ton. The worst mistake was when I let the drawstring on a media bag hang out the back of an aquaclear on my brackish tank.
Noticed it, thought yeah that's fine. Went to sleep. Woke up at 2am in a panic for what I thought was no reason smelled fire. The drawstring was wicking water out of the tank into the power strip. Arcing everywhere. power strip melting. I fixed it and just laid in bed and stared at the ceiling for a long while. Never told my wife

The best part of this is the amount of silent shame involved

 

[Sebastian the Lionfish]

Sometimes I look back at my very first tank setup and just say what the heck was I thinking?! Everything is so wrong about it... from the white live rock that was "cured" when I bought it, to the corals being in the worst possible spots they could have been placed..