Weekly Discussion - Stupidest thing you've ever done

[Anonymous]

Weekly Discussion - Stupidest thing you've ever done

No one in this hobby can say that they never did something stupid to their system. In a effort to allow others to learn from your mistakes, tell us what is the stupidest thing that you have ever done in this hobby, and, if you had it to do over again, what would you have done instead?


About the RDO Weekly Discussion:
This discussion is meant to get at your experience and to share information that is in your head, so don't necessarily treat it as information gathering. State your opinion and, if available, use material, anecdotal or otherwise, that will back up your opinion.
Past weekly discussions will be archived in the archives.
If you have topics that you think would be helpful for the RDO community to discuss, please send me a pm.

 

[Robin Goodfellow]

hi.
Getting into this hobby is the dumbest thing I ever did :wink:

Seriously, I removed the access screw to my Remova skimmer, and after getting distracted, decided to turn on the pump without the skimmer cup on. Well, the water shoot all the way to the ceiling, and my wife wonder why our roof get a leak even on a sunny day....

 

[Len]

This is loooooooooong ago, but one time I switched off my return pump while doing a water change only to forget to turn it back on afterwards (got distracted). Next morning was a very ugly sight.

 

[fungia]

start off with a small tank you always want bigger. im kind of new so im sure i will do lots more stupid things but this one was my first mistake.

 

[wade1]

Probably the most stupid trick I pulled was the put a new fish (in its bag) in my under tank regufium to temp acclimate. The refugium has an open ended standpipe and a few minutes later I realized the sound I was hearing was water flowing....

40 gallons of water later (all over the carpet and under the stand) I realized what an idiot I was allowing the standpipe to get plugged...

Managed to get a shop vac out of the deal in a hurry though.

Wade

 

[Anonymous]

stupidest thing I ever did was to let my roommate take care of my tank when I went to my parent's place for Thanksgiving. It was only a 4 day vacation. I left 5 gallons of top off water beside my tanks (a 15 and a 7gal)

I also talked to her. Please, EVERY morning, when you come out and turn on the tv, please check the tanks and make sure the water levels are up to the mark. IF they are not, please add some water from these jugs untill it's above the line.

I come back, and she had not touched any of the top off jugs. My 7 gal was about 1/3 full, my mantis was dead, and most of the rock in that tank was bleached white.

the 15 was down about 2 gallons, the skimmer pump was pretty much burned up. The only corals that survived were my mushrooms. I lost about $250 of small frags. Then the cyano came. It still hasn't gone completely--away almost a year later.

Before I went on vacation again, I bought a litermeter.

My advice. don't trust your roommate, and buy a dosing pump.

B

 

[DOGMAI]

I hate myself for doing this. After keeping my first tank for about six months I started a ten gallon for a sick tank. Well after I started getting corals some of the things in my original tank had to go. Like the deco crab the chocolate chip the camel shrimp and the erchin. Well they started dying and I did not know why. The fish in the small tank were doing good but all the inverts were dropping like flys after about 2 months. Well after all my reading and research into why this was happening I realized something. Water evaporates salt does not. 8O I had not been checking the salinity in the tank I just checked it when I made the water. Well when I put my hydrometer in there after realizing this the little needle was pegged at the top. 8O 8O Poor things I am a bad bad man. I also did the same thing in the big tank but it had not effected it as fast because of the tank size. I am still working on bringing the salinity down in that tank.

 

[Chucker]

Reversed the Litermeter tubes after doing maintenance on it. Pumped 3 gallons of SW into the kalk bucket.

 

[Anonymous]

The stupidest thing I've ever done to my system was tell my wife how much I paid for my Giesemann MH fixture. I had trouble making purchases for a while after that - and my system suffered!! :x

Jim

 

[Anonymous]

Threw in a 3" panther grouper with a 7" volitan lionfish...it took the lion 30 minutes to swallow the other half after 3 seconds to grab it when it entered the water...

Peace,

Chip

 

[Anonymous]

Miracle Mud. Gave it a whirl and my tank just never got healthy. Mushrooms shriveled and died, buttons curled up and closed, leather corals disintegrated, caulerpa and algae of any sort died within days. Tested for everything under the sun, and all readings came up zilch. Finally yanked the MM from the sump and replaced it with a nice DSB of sugar sand. Ran a polyfilter that turned bright blue (indicating copper, when all the copper tests I ran came up 0). The MM had been leaching some weird copper ion or something into the water, near as I can tell. It's been many months now and the system is happy, healthy and growing like mad.

 

[Anonymous]

i don't have a story since i'm still researching / designing my first reef aquarium and purchasing the equipment, but i just wanted to tell you that this thread and the other weekly topics are awesome info.

thanks!
-me

 

[investigator1]

I dropped my jalli hood halfway into the water. I said, "Oh crap my corals!", and reached in the water to get it. I got the shock of my life and my whole arm was shaking. Somehow I managed to reach over with my other arm and unplug the hood.

 

[Anonymous]

did all your corals/fish/inverts die from the electrocution, investigator1?

 

[Pamela]

Before I bought a float switch, I used to just turn my R.O. on and let it drip into the sump. 20 mins. would usually do the trick and I always remembered to turn it off. until this one time, I got side tracked, and 4 hours later...my sump was almost full to the top!

To my surprize, my s.g. was only 1.020, I keep it at 1.023. I brought the
s.g. back to normal over the next few days and everthing was fine

But the stupidest the I ever did was...I did it again a month later!!!

 

[Reefman150]

I thought I'd give my Yellow Tang a treat of Grape Caulerpa from the refugium to see if he'd like it and he did not even look at it. Some must have gotten loose and hid behind a rock. Now I'm picking at that #@%&**@# stuff every day trying to keep it under control. I have very large pieces of Tonga rock with attached corals so I can't take them out to remove the @#&*#$@@ stuff. Can anyone offer any suggestions?

 

[Anonymous]

Rigged my PCs with zip ties. It took 6 months, but they finally baked the ties enough to crack them, fell in the water, broke the bulbs, got broken glass all over the tank, fried the endcap that also fell in the water, tripped the GFCI, and created a smoking mess. I wasn't home at the time, and my roommates text messaged me: "Your tank is broken."

I have to add the coolest thing I ever did though. I bought a huge 12" lion at a large LFS for my tank at work, and the employee was going to catch the thing in a frigging net. I told him how to do it the right way (catch it in a tupperware) but he was scared of its spines. So I volunteer to catch it in a plastic container barely large enough to fit him in, while he holds the bag. The spines were inches from my fingers as I scooped him up and dumped him in there. When we turned around a small crowd had grown and applauded my amazing lionfish-catching abilities.

 

[Len]

Speaking of electricution .....
I once let my sump water level dip too low; the splash from the overflow water got to the point that so much bubbles were produced it actually busted my glass/ceramic heater (too rapid a cooling from exposing it to air). I can tell you the fish and corals were none too happy Corals slimed up and fish were antsy for days after.

Moral: Either don't ever let any air bubbles travel across glass heaters, or buy a metal/titanium one.

 

[LauraH]

I know I've done alot of stupid things, but I've got to say the stupidest involved a 90gal hex. Because of the depth of the tank, my hubby and I had bright idea of running some PVC down to the bottom with a drilled t-bar going across the tank. We rigged it up so that we could change whether the water was returned at the top or through the bottom via a gate valve. I would usually switch it to bottom return before doing a water change. Well, one day I forgot to switch it back before turning the pump off and leaving the room for a bit. Well, (and here is the really stupid part) with no fail safe in place, you can image what came next. About 30 gal of water all over the carpet later, I realized the folly of that not so bright idea.

Stupidest thing my husband ever did involved a spilt can of PVC cement all over the carpet in the dining room, where he shouldn't have been using it to begin with. Had a big spikey spot in the carpet for years until we finally got rid of it.

Moral of the story....Use ceramic tile if you love this hobby!

 

[investigator1]

The tank wasn't bothered at all. Everything was fine.


What was I saying?