Sadly I have suffered several crashes over the decades. And while they all had a huge cost, whether emotional, financial or ecological hopefully you learn how not to let it happen again, and share that knowledge to protect someone else.
Crashes over the years:
1) Was feeding raw shrimp from the market to Fish only tank with a collection of rare eels. All eels died overnight and all fish followed the next day - Turns out the shrimp was tainted. Some humans who had purchased from the market got very ill - The settlement from the supermarket was enough to buy a nice used car.
2) Had multiple tanks connected outside in the yard. The tanks sat on top of tomato bins filled with rock, water and chaeto. Had some hair algae get out of control. Hair algae actually grew up the side of the tomato bin and over the exterior edge. It looked kind of like a girls hair in a pony tail. The algae was pulling water up to keep itself moist from the bin. It was a neat thing to watch grow. Then it continued to grow down the outside of the tomato bin. The algae ended up creating a siphon that was pulling water out of the bin over the edge and down the outside. Wasn't till the system topoff converted the system from salt to fresh that I discovered what nature was capable of doing.
3) When I initially installed my surge tank I put the pump that pumps the water up to the second story balcony in the back of the display tank. I came home from my sisters wedding at 2am. The tank had about 6" of water in the bottom, with 20+ inches of acros out of the water baking under the halides. A rat had knocked the top off the surge tank (3/4" thick piece of acrylic, had fallen into the surge tank, got sucked into the pipe and stuck. The pump just kept pumping water out of the tank and up on the balcony
4) Did a tank upgrade from a 360 to 400. Had all the local reefers come over and help in a fun picnic/bbq kind of atmosphere. Managed to move a 100+ fish and a couple of hundred corals out of the tank, swap tanks, and then put everything back in without any major losses. We sat back at the end of the day appreciating out accomplishment. And while we gazed at the tank one of the Xlrg clams ejected a huge cloud into the tank.... The clam had spawned. we were all so thrilled. At the time I had over a dozen nice sized clams in my display tank. And in my attached outdoor tanks I was using giant clams as a natural filtration method. Well it turns out once one clam spawns, the others notice and then they all start to spawn. Within an hour we had seen about 3 clams follow suit spawning into the water. The next morning the system water was grey. The spawning of all the clams had overwhelmed the system. The skimmer had turned into a foam machine of chunky grey foam. The clam spawn wiped out about 65% of the tank population.
5) Decided to resurface the floor in the fish room and put in a stained concrete floor. We carefully plastic wrapped and sealed the tank in the room because we were going to be grinding and sanding the concrete. A couple of days into the job late in the day dark foam starts to come out of the plastic wrap around the tank --- Way up high by the ceiling. We pulled open the plastic to find the tank filled with grey water. I went outside to find all the attached tanks foaming with grey foam. And the water was grey silt. Turns out one of the laborers working on the project had taken the wet/dry vac full of concrete dust and dumped it into the outside sump thinking it was a trash can. That laborer became mulch in my yard and the next season the fruit trees turned out some of the most amazing fruit ever. Not only was this a horrible disaster. But there was so much silt in the system that it took months and months of huge water changes and cleaning till the system was able to maintain stable parameters and could start be stocked again (maybe 10 months)
6) Most recent (2.5 years ago) - Wife comes downstairs at 3am to take the dogs out. Sees the tank water is white. She sees 100+ fish lined up dead across the front of the tank. Auto topoff failure. Had a float switch and a second backup float switch - Both failed and the system topped off with Kalk for 7 hours straight. 85% of the livestock was dead immediately. We had a huge population of softies though - Thousands and thousands of zoas. And tons of xenia - And when I say tons - I mean 2 tanks outside that had probably 15+ square feet of xenia and about 6 sq feet of xenia inside. The softies took weeks to slowly keep melting and dying off. I immediately realized that this crash could have been avoided with 2 extra lines of code in my Apex programming. I emailed some of my fish friends with big systems and Apex units and said please please please add these two lines of code to your topoff. Within 6 months those two lines of code saved 2 tanks from the same disaster.
Sadly in this hobby "Feces Happens" and there is little we can do but learn and try to prevent it from happening again to ourselves or anyone else.
Dave B
