My tank is crashing again... who else has had a tank crash?

[Crustaceon]

I had the entire back panel of this tank catastrophically fail. I had livestock swimming on my kitchen floor. Luckily I was home at the time and managed to save most of the fish and coral.

 

[vetteguy53081]

Thats absolutly horrible. I think I may loose all my corals and just got 18 new frags. Probably what did it! If only I had recognized what was happening but I am new and I was so focused on buying a light for my new tank. I should have been doing daily water changes. I check levels weekly and do weekly water changes and I was changing water and noticed salinity down to 1020 brought it back to 1025 in 2 days. I thought it was from my refractometer. Detected ammonia but thought that was from taking out live rock to feed a new fish were were throwing in a lot of food trying to coax it to eat so I turkey basted it up daily except under rocks and did that 4 times or so pretty close together. My hubby put in baby tiger pods for the fish that would eat and they were crawling all over my coral so I thought that was why after the salinty was uped they continued to go downhill. My amonia was only 0.25 so not that high, so I took out fish but didnt realize that was so bad for corals and at the time I noticed the salinty when changing water my nitrates were okay. So after the WC corals started looking bad shrived up at first, now some are gone and down to skeltons about 5 of them, every day a new one bites the dust. I am changing water daily and adding prime and bacteria my nitrites and nitrates are up. I have another tank to move to but its to new and it will likely crash too and dosnt want get things off bad on my new tank. I havnt even been running light! What a mess. I didnt know that there were so many reasons and ways to crash a tank. I bet this wont be my last! I had some real nice expensive frags to that I won, most of them but some I bought! Thats why i put so many in there at once! I live in Florida so dont need one until about nov through march

Does anyone know if low salinity can start a crash and why did it start with the nitrite and nitrates after the salinity was upped and water changed, and just slight amonia. ? The corse of events makes no sense but has to be a crash beacsue levels like this have never been or my tank is just recycling and causing me to loose corals which I suppose is a crash! Corals didint look bad when salinty was up though, after it was all corrected they went downhill. My new tank had the heater go up to over 90 degrees, luckily I had no coral in there. Only 1 fish that is fine now! I dread fall and using heaters now! I am going to get several low wattage ones instead of one high!

Low and High salinity will cause many issues. I suffered 2 years ago a great loss due to false salinity which after taking water to LFS was found to be 1.031. As soon as I brought it down- Success !! Now I use 3 different salinity testers.
Urchin- Never for me. They are like razors and drag and destroy a well packed reef tank IMO