your tank nightmare

O

Orca 33

what was the single most horrible thing that has happen to you since you have been in this hobby and what did you do to correct it. Keep it fish related.
 
I upgraded on the whim from a 55gal to 120gal and lost 95% of all my corals and fish. Just couldnt pass a great deal and cost me triple what I paid in fish and corals. Never again !
 
Had a double float switch failure while on vacation and nuked my 20G that was almost 4 years old and stunning! Run double double redundant (4x) now when I'm gone.
 
Now that the search function is working again (W00t!) I can give ya' a link to my worst:

http://www.dfwmas.org/Forums/viewtopic.php?t=21540

If ya' don't wanna read the whole link, in a nutshell, copper contamination...

On the bright side, it really helped my morale seeing all the club members offering me help in the middle of the night to save my tank... Thanks again ya'll!!!
 
funny you ask. Two year ago this week. I had just set up a 210 transfer from 100gal. It was plumb with a close loop with drains and two returns on the bottom. Well about three days went by and it was going great. Woke up about 5:30am in the morning, I heard the pump sounding funny. I ran down stairs and the sound got louder took the last step off the stair into a pool of water. Walk over to the the tank and it's about two inches of water in the tank. A return threaded pipe on the close loop had popped. I over tighten it. Hadden used threaded plumbing since. Oh yeah, I didn't loose any coral or fish but it cause about $1500 worth of damage. My townhouse was damge of course and the house that shared a common wall with me was damage. The tank was on that common wall.
 
About 2 years ago I walked by my tank and could not see in it. My son (2 years old at the time) dumped a whole container of Cyclopleez into the tank. I lost everything. I no longer keep any food related items near the tank and I have taught both of my kids how to feed the tank.
 
While traveling (which I do weekly as my job) I had a house sitter/pet sitter watching the house, feeding my cat and feeding my fish etc. I trained him up well on the tank, things to look for etc, to check all connections twice a day and report any problems immediately, along with an emergency number to my tank service guy. Well he came in one morning, all was fine with the tank (it looked great at that time BTW, everything was flourishing), then came back that evening to feed my cat and checked on the tank. All the snails had fallen off the glass/rocks and were dead, my starfish (bristle and serpants) were mush and all the corals had mushed out as well. When he called I had him check the pumps and when he put his hand in the sump ZAP.. what had happened was a RIO pump I had feeding my fuge froze and burned up.

That experience cost me everything in the tank except my fish. My service guy arrived 30 mins after the call and declared the tank DOA. He spent the night pulling everything out, rock into a garbage can with PH and heater and transfered my fish to a smaller tank I had then drained and refilled the display.

That was about a 2 years ago now.... once we put the LR back in and re-seeded, I had a non-stop battle with Hair Algae and cyno that no matter what we did we couldn't get rid of it.

Soooo.. I broke it all down again, cooked the LR for 6 weeks without lights and high temp, installed a new DSB. That was 4 months ago now and am happy to report that the LR has started to come back (I purchased some new pieces to re-seed) and no hair algae in sight, though I do have some small patches of dynos that are slowly going away. I am now able to keep shrimp, snails and star fish, cukes etc... and just put in a couple of new pieces of coral, a 10" wall hammer and 5" frogspawn that appear to be doing well.

While it was a very expensive and time consuming ordeal, it has had a plus side. I now have a rock lift that supports my LR 1" off my DSB so I have full efficiency in the tank now and the picking and choosing of the LR to put back in has made me much happier with the rock scape. It also encouraged new equipment, I no longer skimp on pumps and such. I now own tunze and a mag 12 to run the flows.

Unfortunately the risk still does exist that a crisis will happen while I am out of town, but I feel much more comfortable now that I have top grade equipment and backups.
 
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