What caused your tank crash?

BRS
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Going on holidays, while running dirty cheap gear caused me two total crashes. Last one being more than 10y ago.
1. Cheap heater with embedded thermosthat got stuck and boiled the tank.
2. DIY chiller stopped and MH boiled the tank.

Lessons learned: don't buy the cheapest; adopt redundancy for critical gear such as heaters, thermosthats and return pumps.
 
www.dinkinsaquaticgardens.com
Top Shelf Aquatics
I lost 4 fish and a bunch of SPS corals. It was the perfect storm of stupidity . . .

I do 1% daily water changes, so I don't usually test new batch of FSW. But I decided to clean my sump out before going on vacation. While I was at it I figured might as well clean the fuge. This required a 25% water change. And of course, I was sick and tired of Reef Crystals depositing that tan muck in my mix container, so I decided to switch to another brand of salt. A brand I had never used before.

Rolled the new bucket of salt around on the basement floor before mixing. When I opened the bucket I saw that there was no room in the bucket for it to mix. Oh well, figured it would be ok anyway, right? Proceeded to do my 25% water change.

Turns out the potassium was all at the top. My K spiked from 390 to 480! Next morning two fish were dead. Tested everything and discovered the spiked K issue. Had no time to do water changes before flying out. Corals were already starting to RTN. When I got home I saw that two more fish had died and my corals were half gone.

I could blame this on doing a big water change right before going on vacation.
I could blame this on using a new salt right before going on vacation.
I could blame this on ignoring the fact that the salt was never mixed.
I could blame this on not testing Ca, Alk, Mg, and K in the new batch of never before used salt, before using it for a water change.
I could blame this on a lot of mistakes that were made, but I BLAME REEF CRYSTALS FOR THEIR STUPID ANTICAKING AGENT THAT DEPOSITS IN MY MIX TANK!

My lesson learned: Don't ever start using Reef Crystals.
 
WWC
I had a couple birds nest corals and a blue flower cap that were growing exponentially. I was not keeping up with adjusting my dosing pump and was supplementing manually to keep up until I realized I was leaving soon on a three week work trip and had to get the dosing pumps up to speed. Well, about two weeks into my trip the dosser started to get ahead (my tank sitter was testing Ca, and CO3 once a week) and was getting up to about 11.5 dkh. My sitter (rightly) decided to adjust my doser down. Problem was, he did not get it reset properly, and it did not dose at all for the final week of my trip. After 8 days of no dosing my Ca was 280 and dkh was 6.8. Things did ot look to good at that point...:(

So I slowly brought the levels back up and let the tank sort itself out for about 6 months. What survived started to look really good again and i started to add new corals again. Things are back on track, but I will not add weed corals again!
 
A tiny uncured cement rock in the tank boosted alkalinty over 20dkh.

Never assume.
 
A divorce.
Ex Wife kicked me out cause she got caught cheating and it was somehow my fault and everything died within a week or two then she called me and asked why the house smelled so bad.
 
Not really a crash, but in my 55 gallon reef j had ALL of my fish die. The crash was because stray voltage from my hydor korallia pump. I added one extra one and within a day they all died.
 
justingraham said:
A divorce.
Ex Wife kicked me out cause she got caught cheating and it was somehow my fault and everything died within a week or two then she called me and asked why the house smelled so bad.
Click to expand...

I think you won the thread so far. Sorry man
 
Top Shelf Aquatics
Dosing Tri-sulpur for Ick this was my ammonia and now I have brown jelly
IMG_1985.jpg
 
I've had my close calls.... Toddlers are toxic to tanks. Glad I'm not have more of them!

my only true CRASH was my own dumb mistake. We were living in Socal had gone tide pooling.....and I collected some stuff. Most wasnt likely to harm the tank but I picked up a sea slug big one.... I wanted to observe, identify it and release it(knew most dont do well in tanks.) I figured Id have a few days NOPE. It died, Killed EVERYTHING the rock was even dead. 100% restart do over.
 
I haven't had a crash yet but i'm waiting to see what happens.
I mindlessly started some tank maintenance 3 days ago and got carried away. Reefer logic always says to go slow but before I thought about what I was doing, it was already done. I installed a new return pump and it soon became clear that I had too much head pressure due to my return plumbing. No problem, a trip to Home Depot was in order to get some larger pvc pipe to completely rebuild my returns from the pump up- been looking for a reason to deal with this anyway. Got it all glued up and let it sit overnight and cleaned it to prepare for installation. All good so far. I started to remove the old returns from the pump up and knocked over the skimmer, which spilled a bunch of nasty muck into the sump.

Here's where the mindless part comes in. Since the plumbing was removed, the sump was really nasty now so I decided that I would remove the sump and give it a thorough cleaning and remove the coralline from the acrylic. Oh, and the skimmer is filthy, let's give that a major cleaning as well. Before I realized it, I had cleaned everything under the tank. Needless to say, I jacked up my bacteria equilibrium by doing all of this at once and now I have cloudy tank syndrome. Thankfully, the corals and fish aren't showing signs of stress yet and all parameters have managed to remain in check so for. I'm not totally sure how this incident is going to play out yet.
 
justingraham said:
What did I win? It was a nice little payback I mean I loved those fish but nothing like her searching for a stench for a week only to find out it was her fault. Karma always wins.
Click to expand...

I meant yours being the worst.
 
Faulty ato running through Kalk stirrer skyrocketing alk through the roof. Now run a dosing pump and just water in topoff
 
Chewy.com
shoelaceike said:
I meant yours being the worst.
Click to expand...
Alright I'm always shooting to be the best at something
I would first like to thank my ex wife without her this would not have been able to happen
O course my mom and dad couldn't be here without u
And last but not least God himself
Thanks for the award I will print it out and put it above my new tank
And lastly Thanks for everyone that voted for me it means a lot

Yea but in all seriousness with the kalk getting stuck on and or the doseing pump getting stuck on or a calcium reactor not working right. I have read a lot of those it's kinda scary to me. It's a shame that we can loose a whole system from one electronic device messing up.
 
BRS

IF YOU HAD TO TAKE A REEFING EXAM, WOULD YOU PASS?

  • Yes!

    Votes: 32 45.7%

  • Not yet, but I have one that I want to buy in mind!

    Votes: 9 12.9%

  • No.

    Votes: 26 37.1%

  • Other (please explain).

    Votes: 3 4.3%
See comments…

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