What has caused your aquarium to crash?

[Daltrey]

I have tried to put as many failsafes as I could come up with to prevent any emergencies. My tank is basically self sufficient at the moment. I will be adding my first corals next week and then the fun begins. I guess you could say I like to learn from others mistakes, ha. So I am curious about those that have went thru tank crashes and what did you learn from it?

My setup six months in.

DT

QT

 

[Tahoe61]

My one significant crash was from dosing Vodka too fast, the dose was too high, bacterial bloom set in and depleted the available oxygen which caused fish deaths, which further accelerated the quick decline in water quality. Lessons learned dial up any dosing very very slowly, and more is almost never better in this hobby, make one change at a time and wait for results before making another change.

 

[rtparty]

The only crash I've ever had was my very first tank and I added too many fish, way too fast. The biological filtration couldn't handle the increase.

I did have what I call a major disaster during a move. I wanted to fix little things here and there about my setup and that required an all new tank. Very long story short, every fix I tried back fired on me and pushed me out of the hobby as I started slowly losing everything one by one. The tank was doing fantastic before the changes but I just had to fix them! Lol

 

[ca1ore]

My only true tank crash came years ago when the boiler on my house failed and the ambient temperatures dropped to 40 degrees while I was on vacation. I had enough heating capacity on the tank to maintain up to 20 degrees above ambient, but not 40. Consequently the tank was at 58 and everything had died. Something like that is tough to mitigate for. I would suggest that redundancy is important. I never rely on just a single switch, for example, to control any action. There's always a backup.

 

[Heliarc19]

My worst was a power failure while on vacation 6 days in a 240 with some very large fish. The other was stupidity lol, first tank doing a wc and when I had about 1/4 of the water out after sucking sand muck I noticed a sea apple stuck on the glass at the top of the tank, ignorant me freaked out thinking it would die and “release toxins” in the water dumped all of the dirty water back in tank as fast as possible which stirred all the super fine sand. That night and into the next day I watched the fish suffocate a corals expell goo.

 

[Fin]

Two weeks without power, combined with a mandatory evacuation and all entrances to the town roadblocked to prevent return for a week - thanks to Hurricane Rita.

 

[ChiCity]

Earlier this year, around March...
I experienced a complete tank crash due to salifert flatworm exit.
Complete!
I managed to save a couple of zoas and shrooms but that was it...
It was beyond gutwrenching!

 

[kamike91]

I've been in this hobby since I was 5... so just to mention a few: faulty heater, faulty chiller, power outage, step dad turned off the heat while on vacation during cold winter, was sold a purple nudibranch as "easy to care for", dead sea cucumber/sea hare, adding 20+ fish at once, ato tube got knocked loose and shorted the circuit while I was away for 3 weeks, painting near the tank, messing up vodka dosing, experimenting with hydrogen peroxide for algae... I'm surprised I'm still in the hobby lol.

 

[Charles4400]

First time is when my giant sebae nem who was doing fine apparently got very stressed and spewed all this gunk in the tank. Tank was a complete milky white fog when I found it. I had no makeup water and thought i was in the clear when the water finally cleared. Pretty much all fish and corals ended up dead not long after. Beware of giant anemones!

2nd and last crash was during the 6" deep sandbed days when i foolishly removed some base rock that was buried down pretty far and stirred up enough gunk down under that my tank could not take it and everything started dying a slow death.

No more deep sand bed after that.

That was many years ago and other than that tank life has been pretty good to me.

 

[Cory]

Adding a small chunk of uncured cement to my tank assuming it would maintain alk. Sure it did and alk jumped very high and ph too. Most everything died. Never assume, that' why there are professionals.

 

[HB AL]

Fish- velvet outbreak around 25 years ago, wiped them all out before I could even do anything about it.
Coral- none so far(knock on wood)

 

[reefplant221]

I had one tank crash when I mixed a damsel with clownfish and another damsel the one aggressive damsel killed every thing. I was very new to the hobby.

 

[Daltrey]

I had a yellowtail damsel once and got rid of it. Never again, they are way too aggressive. My wife keeps asking to get one every time we go to the lfs. Not gonna happen.

 

[BigJohnny]

Earlier this year, around March...
I experienced a complete tank crash due to salifert flatworm exit.
Complete!
I managed to save a couple of zoas and shrooms but that was it...
It was beyond gutwrenching!

Your tank crashed from salifert flatworm exit? Please elaborate....

 

[tankstudy]

Your tank crashed from salifert flatworm exit? Please elaborate....

Might have been all the flatworms that died from using it.

 

[Doclight]

How about plain Didn't know.. My first saltwater tank, didn't realize that the salt stayed in, and only the water evaporated. Salinity got too high using a cheapo hydrometer.

Knowledge is power!

Amazing what a crappy LFS doesn't tell you...

 

[brandon429]

Aged, hands-off sandbeds are among the greater liabilities that develop as the years go by, there's an unconsidered pathway where they are indeed the breakpoint in a full system crash or not-

power outages.

side by side, I bet a given 2x aquarium test using a 5+yr aged/nonrinsed sandbed running with fish, alongside a bare bottomed tank with even a few more fish but adequate surface area inside, will reveal the BB lasting longer during simulation due to much less biological oxygen demand. A sandbed presents an oxygen sink far greater than the tank's swimming bioload I bet, with increased command coming with increased organic waste levels, a mixed heterotroph's ideal campground. Detritus storage equals unneeded o2 robbing during a highly sensitive time

most are having to dose vodka anyway to systems that employ used DSB's, and BB crews show they're not critical in coral growth. rethink the old sandbed.

That's not to say twenty readers right now aren't doing fine with the core sandbed approach which is employ and house/feed the most diversity possible. Its to say their tank wont beat a BB setup with even a slightly higher bioload during a simulation test, I bet. time w tell, someone might eventually run the experiment.

A new sandbed or a highly rinsed/clean one presents little extra BOD command even though the surface area is still great, due to absence of the high organic portion which is the turbo fuel for bacteria that consume oxygen. my tank is out to 12 yrs old due to not storing detritus, and having backup bubblers handy for power outages. Its also handy to have cheap 20$ amazon fishkams on the system to monitor by cellphone from afar.

a couple of $20 amazon smart ac outlets, and you have a cheap way to intercept issues when on travel. handy for those without the fancy internet controllers. handy as actual backup to those, bubbles on command.

merely being able to shut your tank lights off remotely is a cheap and powerful coral saver too.