What is the dumbest thing you have done????

[g6gang]

I just had this 'what the heck was I thinking moment' recently and was wondering if it may be a good thread for the 'newbie' section so they can avoid dumb butt mistakes we all probably have made.

Here is mine to get things started:

I was about ready to go on a business trip for a week and did not want my wife to have to worry about filling up the sump with RODI water for top off. I just got my Reef Angel controller in the day before and set it up quickly for auto-top off, but did not get a chance to test it out and set it up the way I wanted to permanently. So I decided to just fill up a container with water right next to the tank hooked up a pump to the ATO relay on the controller and then just had flexible tube connected to the pump sitting in the container and then put the tube into the sump tank. I had a little clip thing hookd to the sump tank - so the tube would not slip....just to make sure it would definately not slip, I decided to put the tube as deep as I could in the sump tank.....otherwise if I kept it above the water line the tube may have slipped out of the tube holder I clipped onto the tank...nothing wrong with that right???

I had to leave to the airport in about an hour and said...' let me just make sure the tube won't slip and that the pump comes on' - so I triggered the ATO float switch - the pump started pumping and then turned off like I thought it would (had it set to go off after a few minutes). Looked great..I felt that it was all set and then went to finish packing my bags in another room...

About 30 minutes later I went to bring my bags to the front door which is located right next to my room that has my tank when I heard a little extra bit of water noise...The container that I set next to the tank was overflowing......OMG...***......then the 'I am a dumb butt' moment hit...The tube I used was making water to water contact..after the ATO pump turned off, it created a siphon and was draining my tank into the container and then overflowing onto my floor... thankfully I caught it in the nick of time even though about 3 gallons ended up on the floor - it was inches away from the controller relay box which I did not mount yet....if I would have left for the airport (my wife was my ride) a whole bunch of water would have drained out of my tank and probably fried some electronics... So lesson learned - when I install my ATO more permanently (like in basement), make sure to install a one-directional valve and also make sure the pipe does not touch where the highest water line can be in the sump.

Hope this thread helps others...now don't feel ashamed share your 'dumbest thing I have done' moment

 

[sureal00]

I would say spending about 300 dollars in real reef rock which I end up not liking at all.Dumping 55 gallons of ro di water while angry and ended up setting up my tank with tap water .

 

[Rob Top1]

So so many dumb things, but in the interest of saving newbies some grief I'll say buying a Sea clone skimmer. Talk about dumb. Almost as bad as a Skilter filter.

 

[talwen]

I would say the dumbest thing I have done is overflow my tank with a siphon from ATO and brute trash can... TWICE in 24 hours.

 

[Oscaror]

Using a canister filter! Trashed that thing today, the water in it was brown!

 

[treemanone2003]

My story would be not doing my own research and listening to an LFS, against my better judgement.

 

[Tank.Bro!]

I would have to say in the begin gas a dumb butt I topped off my tank with saltwater a month later dead nems and fish every where. What a day, and I had just bought an urchin

 

[Waters]

I think I have learned from my past mistakes so far my current tank has been mistake free.....but my first tank many, many years ago contained a large Moray, Lion, and two triggers....all in a 29 gallon tank :-(

 

[gemini9]

Dumbest thing I ever did?

Step 1: Bought a new fish
Step 2: Brought fish home
Step 3: Tested parameters
Step 4: Saw my pH at 7.8
Step 5: Thought that was too low
Step 6: Added API 8.2 pH Buffer
Step 7: Immediately raised pH from 7.8 to 8.2
Step 8: Felt at ease
Step 9: New fish died
Step 10: Felt like an idiot

Learned: Never use pH buffers! pH 7.8 isn't all that bad anyway!

 

[phillrodrigo]

I'll have to say my dumbest thing ever would be pretty recent. I drilled a 20 gallon high added it to my main system. I run something close to herbie. On this tank I ran 2 drains one as a back up. I figured the second is only there for if something happens in the tank on the main drain. So after the valves on each drain I connected them and just ran one drain to the sump. My thought on it was that it would actually help it acting like a vent which helps the water go down smoother like your house drain. It may have worked in theory but at the same time I get a huge air sound coming up the backup. So now I need to redo the whole thing. The fittings are butted up into the bulkhead so there's no room to glue to the bulkhead again. I need to take both drains out completely from the bulkheads back.

 

[g6gang]

Good stuff.. keep them coming..

My second dumbest thing was to change all of my T5 bulbs at once... even though I was told not to do that...then not realizing when corals started bleaching that it was the light change..and I still had old bulbs laying around... lost several hundreds of dollars in coral

 

[choff]

Was working on my basement sump and temporarily moved the flex hinge shop light from its safe spot to a 2x16 directly above the sump. I forgot to move it back and gravity did its job and the hood and cfl bulb fell into the sump. Bulb cracked ( thankfully didn't shatter ) and leached God knows what into the tank. I lost 40+ sps colonies and most of my LPS. To make matters worse my RODI unit was down and I had zero water on hand. I ended up having a water company deliver 200g of distilled water in 5g jugs to house. The icing on the cake? I installed an ORP probe a couple of days earlier and if I had set up an alert for any significant drops i could have caught it immediately. My ORP plummeted from 450 to 200 in a matter of minutes. Based on that graph I figured out it took me 8 hours to discover the light in my sump.

That was a fun couple of days.

 

[Mike in CT]

Forgetting to close the top of the tank twice in one month, and losing couple hundred bucks worth of fish on the floor.

 

[_Alex_]

Cutting a return line off to redo it. But didn't make sure that it was above the water level before hand......

 

[d5332]

Here are a few money costing mistakes:

Buying fish known to be jumpers and assuming they will not find the smallest gap/opening to jump through.

Running RODI line to anything, fish tank, reservoir, storage tank without a shut off float valve.

Adding Kalk, Vinegar, Baking Soda, any additives period to the Automatic Top Off water, eventually an incident occurred and all 10 gallons of top off went into the tank at once and PH went up to quickly and some corals died. Don't recommend adding anything to ATO other than RODI water.

Chasing PH without first calibrating the PH probe. PH probe was only a couple of months old and was "lab grade", made dumb assumption that an expensive probe was accurate a few months later. Killed a couple of stag sps before realizing that maybe the "lab grade" probe was bad and it was. My PH was 8.1 all along, dumb mistake to assume that display of 7.4 was accurate. Don't chase PH and if PH is reading abnormally low check your probe.

 

[Shep]

Not letting my tank fish its cycle before adding fish

 

[KorD]

I would have to say that I made a few dumb mistakes over the time...

The biggest one is not having the proper lighting to grow the specific corals.. Without adequate lighing everything dies..I must have killed off a good $100 worth of corals before I found this out..
It was an was mistake that could have been avoided

Another was setting up my ATO and not clamping the tube into my sump. The water level lowers after the tube jumps out of the sump, and I woke up to find my RO/DI water was being pumped, but more across the floor and not one drop made it into the tank out of a 5 gallon container

 

[bairdimusprime]

jumping the gun on cycling...

 

[Longnose Hawkfish]

Doing a water change and then putting that water back in the tank.

 

[Eckolancer]

Moving to a bigger tank in same place and was doing a direct swap of everything. I had a table close to the tank I was using rubber totes on the table to hold rock. Once I started filling the tote with water, the table toppled over. The table had just one center leg and wasn't paying attention to the fact that it would topple over. This was about a 50 gallon tote. All I heard from the wife was "I'm going shopping this better be cleaned up when I get back". She doesn't like the fish tank and this didn't help. Even 10 years later I still get **** about doing that. Worse part was it was on carpet and ended up having to replace carpet as smell never went away. So had to move tank like a month later.