Accidents are inevitable...

alten78 · Jan 19, 2017

It always seems to be, that no matter how good or bad the tank is doing, some kind of accident happens. Be it from a malfunctioning piece of equipment, not paying attention and going through the motions, to outside interference to no fault of your own, accidents are going to happen.

I am guilty of this on so many levels, before I had a float switch on my RODI, I've flooded my container far more times than I like to admit and blamed the ruined wood floor on the refrigerator. I've had a MH pendant hanging wire come loose and drop the pendant into the tank, shattering of course and tripping the breaker, and most recently and to no fault of my own (this time) my darling wife wanted to use RODI for the humidifier and ended up flooding my sump, dropping the SG from 1.026 to 1.021.

Im sure I'm not the only accident prone reefer out there, would love to have someone make me feel better!

Germ42 · Jan 19, 2017

Yeah the best thing in this hobby is anything preventive lol and yet that still seems to fail sometimes! I think that's why I love the hobby because it always keeps me learning and improving! As I look back from starting a little over a year ago to where I am now, I'm am amazed with how many lessons I've learned and how to prevent them from happening again!

clowner · Jan 19, 2017

Well you must always remember that good cant exist without bad
..call it the ying-yang of the aquarium or ying-tang

Jason mack · Jan 19, 2017

alten78 said:
It always seems to be, that no matter how good or bad the tank is doing, some kind of accident happens. Be it from a malfunctioning piece of equipment, not paying attention and going through the motions, to outside interference to no fault of your own, accidents are going to happen.

I am guilty of this on so many levels, before I had a float switch on my RODI, I've flooded my container far more times than I like to admit and blamed the ruined wood floor on the refrigerator. I've had a MH pendant hanging wire come loose and drop the pendant into the tank, shattering of course and tripping the breaker, and most recently and to no fault of my own (this time) my darling wife wanted to use RODI for the humidifier and ended up flooding my sump, dropping the SG from 1.026 to 1.021.

Im sure I'm not the only accident prone reefer out there, would love to have someone make me feel better!

I'm fairly new too the hobby .just over a Year now .. begin last Year i upgraded my 10g too a 25 g that i got given free .. i was cleaning it in the shower went too turn it over and dropped iT breaking the bottom out of it .. so got new glass and put a new bottom in .. got the tank up and running .. so now 2 twice in the last Year , after doing maintance on my tank took the power head out too clean it .. put it back in , Little later ive turned the flow up .. half an hour later i noticed water all over the Floor around my tank:mad: .. first thing .. panic !!! Second thing panic some more .I dont know why i do it .. but i always assume my tank has sprung a leak .. run round like a chicken without a head , contemplating and almost pulling my whole tank apart .. ..then realize when cleaning the water up ,that it's only because I put my powerhead back in my tank too high

.. what a plonker I am !!!!
Am I the only one who panics like this ??

cbutkos · Jan 19, 2017

I've woken up to "BABE YOU LEFT THE WATER RUNNING AGAIN!" and having a few gallons of water spread out across the floor too many times. Just this past week when it happened it was my girlfriend's fault, I still had to clean it up but it was a small price to pay knowing that now she knows how easy it is to forget. Maybe I'll get less guff next time I do it. Maybe.

Germ42 · Jan 19, 2017

Lol thats like something everyone with an RO system has gone through lol or the float messes up lol

CarrieB · Jan 19, 2017

I set an alarm on my smart phone when I do something that needs to be undone before I go to bed. Getting way too absent-minded.

Watevadog5 · Jan 19, 2017

My biggest accidents happen when I am tinkering in the tank, knock a rock or coral over and boom its now broken. The amount of sticks I have snapped are uncountable. Upside is free frags for local reefers!

cbutkos · Jan 19, 2017

CarrieB said:
I set an alarm on my smart phone when I do something that needs to be undone before I go to bed. Getting way too absent-minded.

My phone alarm catches it 9/10 times. It's always that one time that gets ya.

SteveSTL · Jan 19, 2017

I left the water on so many times I ended up ripping out the carpeting in the basement and tiling the floor. Of course, now I have a float on a Brute and turn the water off to the float when I go down and there hasn't been an issue in ages (furiously knocking on wood)

DracoKat · Jan 19, 2017

My biggest accidents to date:

One of my wrasse jumped into the overflow and got stuck in the pipes, which caused the water to overflow from the DT. about 3 gallons of water on the floor by the time I got home from work. (Wrasse didn't make it

)

Second accident, I have two screen tops. I moved one off to do some work. I had failed to see my firefish jump out and landed on the closed screen top, under the light. Until hours later, he was cooked under the light

JMC1018 · Jan 19, 2017

Just happened this weekend with my sumo emptying out because my reactor house wasn't where it was suppose to be. Now I will make sure when im working in that area everything is where it is suppose to be.

pscheel2 · Jan 19, 2017

CarrieB said:
I set an alarm on my smart phone when I do something that needs to be undone before I go to bed. Getting way too absent-minded.

Me too! But then I misplace the smartphone

alten78 · Jan 19, 2017

My mixing station is rodi gravity fed on top of the mixing bucket, very easy for her or anyone to go in there and dump fresh rodi into the sump...which happened and we had another class on how valves work and which way they should go. The result being, don't touch anything anymore

.

Took a few hours but I was able to get my sg back up to 1.025. That's what I get for telling people my parameters have been rock solid for awhile!

revhtree · Jan 19, 2017

If you haven't flooded something, even a little, then you haven't been reefing long enough! HA!

Squirrel_reefer · Jan 19, 2017

I have shakey hands, can't tell you how many times I've knocked over a rock or bumped a power head while my hands are in the tank.

ReefNo0ob · Jan 19, 2017

revhtree said:
If you haven't flooded something, even a little, then you haven't been reefing long enough! HA!

Amen to that one! Ive only been in the saltwater side of the hobby a little over 2 months...2 weeks into my tank running i learned 2 lessons simultaneously... lesson 1:make sure EVERY piece of plumbing that needs to be glued...is glued!!(will get to that in a second..) Lesson 2: Dont panic! This one happened about 2 weeks into my current tank running..after i got everything plumbed i had a very small leak up by my return bulkhead..thought nothing of it because it just slowly dripped back into my sump and eventually stopped from salt creep. I woke up one morning for work and heard a weird fizzin noise so i instantly ran to my tank. The old heater sitting in my sump was sizzling and shooting water out from where the cord enters the actual heater!! (Was a super old aqueon that was supposed to be fully submersible) instead of following the cord and unplugging it i panicked and yanked the heater cord to get it unplugged asap. Welll the cord caught on my ball valve on the return pipe and twisted and broke my plumbing shooting water everywhere!!! (Remember that small leak? Yeahhh forgot to glue the coupling to the pvc that was glued to the bulkhead and broke at that exact spot...BIG whoops) by the time i figured out my 1000gph return pump was the cause of the fountain (remember still panicking and couldnt think clearly) and unplugged it, i had 7 gallons all over my new carpeting in my apartment!! Had to miss work and spent the next 7 hours suctioning water out of the carpet with a carpet cleaner i borrowed from my parents...Everything is fine and dry and no casualties miraculously. But my lesson was to always stay calm and find the source!

ReefNo0ob · Jan 19, 2017

Biokabe · Jan 19, 2017

A few years back, I went on vacation. Before leaving, my tank was in probably the best shape it had ever been in. I finally really knew what I was doing, I had a shiny new LED setup that was growing things like crazy, there was pretty much no algae in the tank, and the worst problem I had was that corals were growing too fast and needed to be pruned back.

The thermostat in my heater broke the night we got home, and of course I didn't catch it. The next day at work, my wife sends me a text message, telling me that the tank was all cloudy. I figured it was nothing and told her not to worry about it. When I got home, I finally realized what she meant by cloudy. It was milky white inside. Trying to find the source, I opened the tank and stuck my hands inside, and immediately I knew what the problem was. Upon locating my thermometer, the temperature inside the tank was 103 F. The cloudiness was my xenia corals literally melting into the water column. I tried to implement a poor-man's chiller (pull out about a gallon of tank water in a bucket, soak the bucket in another bucket filled with ice, pour the cooled water back into the tank), but of course it was already too late. With the exception of one fish (a flametail blenny who finally died last year, after six years in the tank), everything died. Corals, CUC, worms, starfish, fish, pods. All dead.