Share your NOOB experience and WIN a TUNZE Reefpack 250!

rajkovich207 · Jan 4, 2013

Alright, lets try to figure out where to begin with this one. I have been in the hobby for just under 2 years, and still consider myself a noob (just not as bad any more). My first tank was a 5.5 gallon aquarium (mistake 1) I went to good will and paid $3 for a 2 bulb t8 desk lamp to use as lighting, and a hob filter for filtration, then one day the power decided to go out... for 5 days... and being the noob I am, I wasnt prepared, so I grabbed a long piece of air line tubinbg and blew into it and used the bubbles in the tank to get the water moving..... (not going to number the mistakes anymore lol), that tank wound up with 4 inch long hair algae covering everything (not kidding here...).

giving up on that tank I decided to upgrade to a 20 long. Now I am not a patient person, so I dumped in the bag of live sand, added some dry rock filled up the tank and sat back to see my cloudy tank (you couldnt see more than 2 inches in), no biggie right? wrong I had gotten a yellow clown goby to cycle the tank with from my local big box LFS... lost him, and several other fish for not doing my homework first... and being that I have no patients, I started to throw some coral in right away!... wrong... I seriously dont even want to count the money Ive thrown away on $10 frags... lets just say I stopped counting after I realized I could fill a shoe box with the skeletons... that tank made it almost a year but for the last 4 months I was fighting a crash , and tore it down for my current tank...

I realize this is long but im almost done, and I will have covered the basic mistakes ive made lol.

Alright, present day. I own a biocube now. Its just the way I want it, ive been keeping my hands out of the tank, everything is perfect imo! except, during a water change a couple months ago, I was syphoning out some water, went to grab something from the clostet, the hose popped out of the tank, and I lost about a gallon of water. O well grab the towel and start the clean up... Untill I realized it went all over a power head I had plugged into an extension cord... So I reached down to unplug it, got jolted.. tried again... got jolted... and one more time... I toughed it out and got it done!!! My girlfriend came running into the room becouse she heard me yell lol. after explaining what happened, and she was done laughing of course... she asked why I didnt unplug the extension cord from the wall instead?

I have flooded our room many times... many many gallons worth of water, even enough to leak into the basement... (I think Im in the range of 3 large floods, and about 10 large spills). but alas I am finally learning. I also fed a majano because I thought it was a free anemone, Ive delt with every pest you can think of. (just recently added AEFWs to that list) and composed a bullet proof medicine cabinet, now I can fight literally just about everything and it has payed off!

Thanks for reading my short novel here, I hope you enjoyed... and just remember that this is just the tip of the iceberg on my end lol.
Happy reefing NOOBS!!! Tony.

rajkovich207 · Jan 4, 2013

Sorry, always proof read before you post lol. I meant patience not patients lol. and im sure thers more ive missed.

Isoprene · Jan 4, 2013

I bought a 3 ft tessalata and put him in a 55 bowfront and thought I could do corals haha.....DOH! Guy almost bit me multiple times and i eventually sold him back to a LFS. Noob mistake for sure.

mattgreene22 · Jan 4, 2013

In my first tank I made SW in a 5 gallon bucket with a maxijet for mixing....um, yeah...be sure you unplug your maxijet before moving your bucket or you'll get hosed down like I once was.

Another? Sure...I had an issue when I tried to use my return pump to empty my sump in a water change....couldn't remember which outlet or strip the pump was on when it was time to turn it off...I and the wall ended up pretty wet while my pump got a little too dry.

One more? Seaclone...nuf said

SteelerMike · Jan 4, 2013

When I first got my refractometer I didn't realize it needed to be calibrated after the first time. My tank had been set up for about 3 months and I had just purchased a royal gramma and a six line wrasse. I checked my salinity it it read 1.033! I freaked out and drained 10 gallons of water out and put in 10 gallons of fresh water, only to realize my mistake, so I mixed up 5 gallons of salt water and added that. All in about an hour. Needless to say this stressed my new fish out quite a bit and they died the next day :cry: So I learned a few lessons: Never overreact and do anything that quickly again (even if the reading was right I would not have wanetd to bring it down that fast) and I always recalibrate my refractometer before I use it now.....

Patty · Jan 4, 2013

Started my first saltwater tank and began feeding the fish like crazy and dosing everything under the sun that the lfs told me to, I ended up with phosphates trough the roof and brown algae and diatoms everywhere!!! Now I know better

Mstansbery · Jan 4, 2013

My first attempt at constructing an acrylic tank! :tongue: -circa 2003

schooleyosis · Jan 4, 2013

On my first saltwater tank I was dosing part A and B per the recommendation on the bottle without testing the levels. Woke up one morning and it looked like it had snowed in the aquarium. Ooooopsies!

dougers31 · Jan 4, 2013

A while back there was this coral auction site call Aquatic Auction... I placed several bids on some acan colonies thinking I would win one or two without telling my wife.... 4 colonies and $800+ later and she was less than happy

It actually turned out pretty good for me(minus the upset wife part) since I fragged them up and sold enough frags to make my money back, and still had some nice pieces left for my tank.

jt17 · Jan 4, 2013

I bought a sweet tank on CL last year (still a noob) that came with a 4' light that sat on the cross braces of a 6' tank and half the bulbs worked (I'm sure the others were putting out 100%, not) bio balls in a sump, a huge pond return pump, and a skimmer (4" dia.) that was twice the size of the one I had when I got out of the hobby 20 years ago (power outage tank crash broke my heart). This was, after all, state of the art hobby equipment, 20 years ago. Well, after buying a new sump, skimmer, heater, LED lights ($ouch$), return pump, etc., etc. I learned always buy new if you can. Especially now with all the new technology. The new toys they're making for our tank inhabitants keep getting better and better.

Aere · Jan 4, 2013

my biggest noob mistake was trusting that my son would leave the tank alone, and I left a bottle of flake out and he dumped the whole bottle in. His intentions were good, but the outcome was horrible. He pulled a chair up, and dumped it right on in. Now everything is put up! And the new tank is in my bedroom where he isn't allowed

Willowdale · Jan 4, 2013

A year ago I got back into reef keeping from about a 10 year break. Still had a lot of the equipment in the garage. Stated everything back up with new live rock all is good tank cycled, etc. A few months into it things aren't looking to good. Checking params etc and nothing too funky. Salinity is at 1.025. But using my original hydrometer from ten years ago. Decided I should buy a new one just to make sure and the new one reads 1.031. Recheck with my old one and it reads 1.025. Lesson learned.

JMMJ13902 · Jan 4, 2013

Here are some noob mistakes that I can't never forget:

1. Feed the fishes more than 5 times a day.

2. Auto top of with salt water

3. Re-use old crushed coral sand that caused the nitrate to spike

4. Adding 5-6 of tangs in a 55 gal

5. Last but not least.....I used city water with 500+ TDS to keep corals....they didn't last for a week

6. Please PM me for the shipping address lol

7. Thank you R2R and Tunze for the great give away

a49panhead · Jan 4, 2013

put in a seba nem with out water drip. it did not make it.

MaxCanada · Jan 4, 2013

overflow lost siphon and flooded the basement :/

Bootstrap · Jan 4, 2013

Ato with salt water. /facepalm..

Sent from my DROID RAZR MAXX HD

strange33w · Jan 4, 2013

well for mine I mis read how to cal a refractometer and insted of setting it to 35ppt I set thecal to 1.035 sg so my salinity in my tank was verylow once I found this out 1.10 to be exact. Once I fixed the mistake everything started to look better. What a surprise.

SK360 · Jan 4, 2013

I am just starting. Help me avoid the noob stories

Elysium · Jan 4, 2013

Mine, oh where to begin....

1) Top off with saltwater (especially without a hydrometer)
2) Damsels are good fish to add for a splash of free swimming color, right?
3) Hey, one of my fish in QT bullied a second fish to death and the water looks like crap. They've been in there 6 weeks with no signs of disease, so they're safe to add to the display tank right? (oh hello ich outbreak).
4) Those poor fish at Petco, let me try and save them.
5) Hiding a canister filter in the stand. What a great idea!

I'm sure there are more that I have blocked out from the the shear horror of it all.

quigimon · Jan 4, 2013

Had my tank going for almost a year before i decided to put any fish in it as it was not financially prudent for me to do so but i received some small button polyps, xenia and green star polyp that satisfied me for a while, then it came time to add some fish, i picked up 2 clowns from a lfs acclimated them to the dt, then put them in, they did great, were getting along cruising the tank, then i decided i wanted to get a Red Mandarin which got stuck in some rock work up to his pectoral fins and died before i got home from work, and decided to replace him with a red scooter blenny as well as i picked up a tang, acclimated them to the tank and dropped them in as well. In the span of 2 months, no quarantining all is well. I turn the lights off on the tank before going to bed on christmas eve, everything is beautiful, tang is picking my rocks clean, clowns are being their strange selves, and the scooter is hunting the rock, all is good. I wake up Christmas day and look into my tank with my moonlights on and i see my yellow tang is not doing well.

now sadly this is the best picture of anything I've taken in my tank, and seems to be the worst case of MI I've found even from Google images. I take the rock down, and out to get to the fishes, place them into a 20L with water from the tank, and the only thing i have is copper we picked up from walmart for my daughters Betta, but it's all i had on Christmas day. I lost the scooter and the tang that day, a clown the next, and the last clown the day after that... it wasn't a good christmas and i learned the importance of a qt tank and since i didn't qt any of the pets i got i have no clue which one may have brought it in, or if they all had it and got stressed out to bring it out.