Biggest Disaster

[Gator0930]

Following my interaction with a couple people in others posts, I was wondering what peoples whoops moments were. What is everyones biggest tank disaster? Whether it was a nuisance fish, poor research, impulse buy, or equipment? I believe in knowledge, so no disaster is to big or to small. It will teach someone else and provide a little fish humor at the same time.
I will start it off, I decided to get blue damsels. I had to remove all my rock to catch them and put them in my wife 14 gallon. They ticked off the clowns in there. Their was four, but the clownfish killed and ate two of them. If that was not bad enough, I saw a great deal on a few wrasse i had been eyeballing at my LFS. I brought them home and they all hid from the blue sided fairy wrasse. Had to tear my tank apart to catch him and take him back to the LFS when he ate $60 in shrimp.

 

[SashimiTurtle]

Small oops... coral beauty, it has eaten 3 montipora in 2 weeks. They aren't dead, just in really bad shape. It's not making the move over to the new tank next week.

Big oops... Tahitian moon black sand from CaribSea. It was full of vanadium and nickel and the cause of 6 months of STN on every SPS that went in the tank. Never again will I use black sand.

 

[justjes45]

Pulsing Zenia. Definitely.
LOVE the look and the way they move, but took over my entire tank, I scraped the rocks to contain them multiple times, and eventually I replaced the rocks...

 

[User1]

Big oops - going on a vacation in 2001 and living in California during the summer which also just so happened to be a family reunion type vacation. Like the trifecta of failure. Anyway some of you may recall our lovely politics and Enron caused brown outs (power failures) while on vacation we had a series of back to back to back outages which caused my AC to go out while on vacation. Since most of family was on same vacation and no one left behind to check these things my 100 gallon over heated, evaporated sump dry, burnt out pumps. and proceeded to destroy the rest of the tank and equipment with all of the power cycling and loss of AC to cool.

Vacation or travel + reef tank = must have contingency plan of some sort to help in cases like these. That is my more or less biggest ops and failure.

 

[manilaboy1vic]

i have a couple full on oops moments..

clove polyps.. from around 2015.. just today i scrubbed some rogue polyps of my LR with a tooth brush..

2 part dosing overkill.. that made quite a mess of equipment.

 

[Gator0930]

Small oops... coral beauty, it has eaten 3 montipora in 2 weeks. They aren't dead, just in really bad shape. It's not making the move over to the new tank next week.

Big oops... Tahitian moon black sand from CaribSea. It was full of vanadium and nickel and the cause of 6 months of STN on every SPS that went in the tank. Never again will I use black sand.

interesting. The wife and i were just looking at the black sand in the store

 

[Gator0930]

Pulsing Zenia. Definitely.
LOVE the look and the way they move, but took over my entire tank, I scraped the rocks to contain them multiple times, and eventually I replaced the rocks...

There are definetly some invasive corals. I bought a nice rock of star polyps. only to do research and realize they are extremely invasive

 

[Gator0930]

Big oops - going on a vacation in 2001 and living in California during the summer which also just so happened to be a family reunion type vacation. Like the trifecta of failure. Anyway some of you may recall our lovely politics and Enron caused brown outs (power failures) while on vacation we had a series of back to back to back outages which caused my AC to go out while on vacation. Since most of family was on same vacation and no one left behind to check these things my 100 gallon over heated, evaporated sump dry, burnt out pumps. and proceeded to destroy the rest of the tank and equipment with all of the power cycling and loss of AC to cool.

Vacation or travel + reef tank = must have contingency plan of some sort to help in cases like these. That is my more or less biggest ops and failure.

That is horrible. What have you done as a backup if this happens again

 

[Gator0930]

W

i have a couple full on oops moments..

clove polyps.. from around 2015.. just today i scrubbed some rogue polyps of my LR with a tooth brush..

2 part dosing overkill.. that made quite a mess of equipment.

hat happened with your dosing overkill?

 

[manilaboy1vic]

hat happened with your dosing overkill?

nothing really i didnt have much in the tank.. just massive calcium buildup everywhere in the sump and on the pumps.. my media reactors got all gunked up too.. hard calcium build up in there.. still usable but can see whats going on with the gfo, i recently just replaced them (brs canisters and cartridges)..

just make sure you go real slow with dosing 2 part.. and test alot.

 

[SashimiTurtle]

interesting. The wife and i were just looking at the black sand in the store

Stay away...

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/ati-results-back-sources-of-vanadium.385031/

 

[Cherub]

Stay away...

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/ati-results-back-sources-of-vanadium.385031/

black sand always looked dirty when I had it in my tank too. I could vacuum it twice a week and it still looked terrible.

My biggest woops are always going on vacation. Something always goes wrong! October I had a crash because I hired someone and forgot to take out my filter socks. My sitter never looked and told me things were looking bad. I get home to a dead tang and lost 3 more fish over a week and lots of corals. Over dirty filter socks that could have easily been removed.

 

[Reeferguy365]

Big stupid oops... didn't have a heater on my 180 gallon during winter I thought the warmth of the house would be good enough because it always was on my 30 gallon yeah $2,500 worth of SPS down the drain and yes lesson learned. The worst part was I had a brand new heater sitting in my garage for that tank

 

[Mark Gray]

35 years ago adding a Passers Angle to a very peaceful tank killed everything but was a cool fish for awhile lol

 

[40B Knasty]

Not knowing the importance of a level tank.

 

[ReefNoobie88]

Niger trigger. Got him from a buddy, totally peaceful and never harassed anything or ate inverts. 3-4 weeks of being in my 90g and he’s beating the crap out of my clowns, hawkfish, and yellow tang. The tang held his own, but could see signs of stress. Now I’m dealing with an overly aggressive hawkfish from this little ordeal. Never again unless it’s in a predator tank.

 

[mcarroll]

This just in:
(not sure it's really a "disaster")

I was trying to mix up 5 gallons of CaCl for Recipe #2 tonight. Not something I run out of often (that's the whole idea of making so much at once), so the process is not in muscle memory. ;Bookworm

Crediting lack of sleep: Instead of simply taking the 1 gallon directions x5 to get five gallons of the same mix, for some reason I decided to x5 to the target concentration in my calculation as well.

5 gallons ordinarily lasts me 2-3 years I think...;Writing...so I basically just mixed about 10-15 years worth of "calcium concentrate" – or 25 gallons worth. ;Woot;Jawdrop

(Yes, it was hot. REALLY hot. )

 

[NY_Caveman]

When we did our kitchen remodel recently my wife suggested we should move our AquaMaxx rimless planted tank which homes a Halfmoon Betta. The cabinet under the tank had these soft attachments on the legs so one could move it over the hardwood. I said sure and grabbed the bucket to remove most of the water.

"What are you doing?" she asked, "It's tiny, let's just move it."
I explained I had to remove some of the water and took out about 75%.

Well, we slid the cabinet about 20 feet when it suddenly collapsed. I literally caught the tank as it fell and and not a drop spilled. It was a small tank, and freshwater, but if we had moved it full, it could have been pretty crappy. Funny thing is I was worried about moving a rimless tank like that, not the cheap, old stand.

By the way, I am the engineer in the family.

 

[justjes45]

interesting. The wife and i were just looking at the black sand in the store

I have a black “Hawaiian” sand and it has been great.

 

[Gator0930]

black sand always looked dirty when I had it in my tank too. I could vacuum it twice a week and it still looked terrible.

My biggest woops are always going on vacation. Something always goes wrong! October I had a crash because I hired someone and forgot to take out my filter socks. My sitter never looked and told me things were looking bad. I get home to a dead tang and lost 3 more fish over a week and lots of corals. Over dirty filter socks that could have easily been removed.

My filter sock was just a problem recently. I forgot about changing it and wondered why my Nitrates were so high. When I remembered, i took out the sock (following what others do on here) and my nitrates nearly instantly dropped. I am going to try to run without one for a while and see what i get.