Share your NOOB experience and WIN a TUNZE Reefpack 250!

clamstamp · Jan 20, 2013

...in my first "reef"..i would top-off evaporated water with more saltwater....reefing seemed impossible to me.=[

mfinn · Jan 20, 2013

I tried keeping a elegance coral and a couple gonioporas in a tank with a undergravel filter and as many 40 watt fluorescent lamps as I could lay on top of a 55 gallon tank.

Xler8n · Jan 20, 2013

So i have this 20 gallon tub that i use for my top off water. Im like ok im gonna start making some water and ill keep an eye out. Drip Drip Drip... This is taking forever. After 4 or 5 checks with barely any difference i told myself im gonna take a quick nap and when i wake up it should be done.. Several thousand drips later...MOTHER OF GOD. Half my basement was a swamp along with the first 6 feet of carpet in my room was completely soaked to the floor. Im talkin i would step in a wet spot and a puddle would rise from the floor. OMG my grandparents where gonna be Pi**ed!! (I live with them by the way) Picture me comming out of my room and seeing water water everywhere, then running upstairs and emptying the linen closet for anything that would soak up water along with every single towel in the house including the ones hung in the bathroom for "human use". It is a finished basement so there is no drain in the floor anywhere. Im on hands and knees with a towel, pillow case, bedsheet anything i could find trying to soak up all this water. Well my grandmother was Pi**ed afterall because i seemed to use every single towel in the house. No one could take a shower. It was a mess. What a noob!! It took about 10 loads of laundry to wash everything. Now i use an auto shut off when i make water. Funny how your like i dont need that, ill just keep an eye out. Yea... until something disasterous happens then your like how could i do without it? Why did i do without it? I used to be a noob, then it took a flood to the basement. LOL

tapout · Jan 20, 2013

When I first started off I thought any rock would be fine as live rock and adding any rock because I didnt like how mine looked would be fine.....

Fishinwall · Jan 20, 2013

I'm so new to the saltwater hobby....so new that my tank isn't even up and running yet, but have been planning it since March 2012!
All I know is I'm buying a whole bunch of expensive products...hoping I'm doing it right from the beginning.

I did get an RO/DI from a friend...I was really excited about this find....only to find out all the filter canisters were sealed shut from non-use. So I'm back to buying new.

nivram · Jan 20, 2013

With my very first marine aquarium, I put a mangrove snapper I caught during a fishing trip in my tank. It didn't take long before it was the only fish in the tank.

reef_junkie96 · Jan 20, 2013

When I first began this journey, I knew little to nothing, and took every word from my lfs as gold. Well I bought a "scratch proof" 65 gallon reef, threw it in the back o the pick up and it scratched the whole side, in amazement she said, oh wait, acrylic is easy to scratch, glass isn't, and gave me store credit, so I buy dry live sand, and she assures me that argonite is NOT a good thing, instead pushes me into 56lbs of silica sand, and says, it will cycle almost instantly. Knowing that I was planning to eventually have a reef, I said I needed some live rock, she replied, that stuff is over priced, buy your self some of these huge lava rocks. Needless to say, my tank was a cyano, and green hair algea factory, sence then, the tank has been fixed, lfs changed, and reef looks amazing, but every now and then I find me making a newb mistake, like not checking the back of e hydromoter for bubbles, and panicking because my salinity was over 1.042

. You'll learn a lot from your experiences is all I've got to say!

Rick C · Jan 20, 2013

Ultimate noon mistake... Thinking aiptasia were awesome anemones... And feeding them often. Lol. Those bad boys got huge.

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Rpujol85 · Jan 20, 2013

Bought a rimless biocube type tank (still haven't seen another like it, even doing web searches) used from craigslist: tank, stand, and a maxijet 1200 all for $200. Did I mention the hacked up rear chambers I wasn't aware of. (First tank ever, no idea what I was really getting/needed).

Now about 2-3 months in to it, and I still have not figured out what the different compartments are supposed to be used for. The way I have it setup now is working well , but I know for sure its not what the manufactirer had intended. Wonder if at least it's close to what the person who chopped up the rear chambers was thinking?

MitchReef · Jan 20, 2013

I believed everything my LFS told me.....now that was a disaster......

mdlnewman · Jan 20, 2013

Thinking a maxima might still be alive, probably 3-4 days after it's demise. Almost completely nuked my tank.

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Djtonton · Jan 20, 2013

Back when i first started i purchased a 14 gal bio cube. The local store also sold me a bunch of SPS telling me I could start of with these in my tank right away. Now i know why they went out of business after the first week i bought the tank.

Man i wish i would of known about these forums earlier they died in hours lol.

luckly i found this forum and R2R has helped GREATLY I have been in the hobby for about 9 years on and off.

bwig333 · Jan 20, 2013

First tank was 55g non rr with HOB fuge. I was given some new rock which had some cool little corals on it. These little corals began multiplying quickly. Next thing I know these corals are everywhere, so I decided to do a little research. Turns out they were aptasia. It took forever to get rid of them, but did learn a copperband butterfly is a pretty good way to get rid of them.

richink · Jan 21, 2013

Well I have been back into saltwater a lil over a year. As for noob I would say I qualify for many reasons. I know so little about this hobby, most anyone in the hobby that talked to me would definitely call me a noob.. I have basic equipment on my tank, but my corals are anything but basic

I use a hand-me-down canister filter,hand me down fish even lol. I have no bells and whistles yet but a mp40 I got in a trade ...but i have one green thumb. I'm very good at what I do, for what I have, and the little I know... any way my worst experience was a few years back I bought a used tank with a retro fit compact florescent bulb in it. It was very used and old.. I knew nothing at the time, just that I wanted one...so i got this tank, added a few kenya trees and mushis. I loved it but wasn't very good. High high high nitrates most the time. So any way after having it for a while one of the lights started to short out on the wiring...well I had been super busy and couldn't address the issue so I unplugged the one light for a few days. Well my wife came home for lunch one day and plugged it in, then walked out the door and poof the house was gone. We got home later that night to the house burnt to the ground...it was a very ruff time.. we have 4 kids and we had just spent a ton of money paying it off and remodeling the kitchen. Also because of that we had no insurance..so it was a very devastating thing. It took us a long time to get back on our feet. I didn't think I would ever get back into the hobby again but now we are renting a lil place and I have set up another tank and i love it! With time I will buy all the nice stuff and learn more and more..I do great with corals and I have alot thanks to a great guy I met on cultivated reef, Greg Kinerson. He has been my gift to many opportunity's ..and i could never thank him enough..so any way that's my story and I hope it qualifies me for a noob experience and a good story...thanks R2R you have also been amazing

GR808 · Jan 21, 2013

Ok, don't laugh but when I started money was an issue for this hobby so instead of buying a RO/DI unit for top off, I figured I could use water from my refrigerator dispenser. Worked for a while until I got a good deal on a RO/DI unit and OMG what a difference. Imagine what I could have kept if I had used the RO/DI unit from the start..
Don't cut corners folks..

pgravis · Jan 21, 2013

My first experience with a fish tank was a couple years ago. My buddy had pulled some glass shelves/windows down and we decided to make a fish tank out of them. It was similar in size to a 55 gal. We knew nothing about what we were doing. His wife wisely said no way! So before I could ask my wife, we hauled it to my house and quickly set it up. I probably added over $100 worth of freshwater plants, gravel, under gravel filter (home made of course), and a few fish. I was pretty proud....for a day. Came home from work the next day and the floor was covered with water, plants and a few dead fish. Amazingly a couple survived. After that I was hooked. My buddy felt bad about what happened, so he went and bought me a real 55 gal. I did a lot more research on that tank and eventually that research led me to salt water and then I was truly hooked.
So once I had my salt water tank setup I was very methodical and planned everything. I came up on my first vacation and left very detailed handwritten instructions for my house sitter. Unfortunately he misread my writing and thought I said to add butter instead of buffer! He added a small amount, saw it floating in the tank and quickly realized something was wrong with that idea. Luckily it caused no ill effects, and now I leave much clearer instructions!

nathanrx8 · Jan 21, 2013

I've always wanted a reef tank but didn't have the money so for a while I saved I finally got one bought a 100 gallon tank and for a 100 bucks with a lot of help for the guy at the pet store i finally put it all to together I've had it for a year know and work on it really slowly man I couldn't wate the see it done and it still isn't i have all the fish i want it but not the corals but im still going slow id have to say this was the best long EXPERIENCE I have ever had. but the very first thing that die was a green chromis it got suck up into the power head poor thing .

Nordic · Jan 21, 2013

I had a HOB protein skimmer that kept mysteriously overflowing... found out there was a large dead snail plugged into the return line. Took me at least 3 times of taking it down and inspecting everything, changing pumps, etc to find out it was just an obstruction in the pipe... girlfriend was not happy when I was at work at night to find water all over the floor!

RADION LOVER · Jan 21, 2013

was told always to dip anything before i put into my tank bought 60lbs live rock dipped for 30 minutes put in tank skimmer overflowed every hour and i was doing wAter changes everyday and i killed my live rock....