Ok people, time to tell of your worst experiences in this hobby

[Scoobaman17]

Ok to start this thread off, I'll start with 3 of mine.

1, the house I moved into got re-painted: the fumes got into my 75 reef and wiped out everything.

2, water followed a cord down to the electrical soket causing sparks and my stand to catch on fire.

3, my overflow to my refugium got pluged on accedent and flooded into the living room. I came home to an inch deep of water everywhere but the tank.


Now reefers, there has to be many instances of bad luck with this hobby, so spill ;

[TippyToeX]

5 years or so ago I had a 75g tank fully stock, crack in the middle of the night. The front pant pretty much went outand dumped everything onto my brand new carpet. All that was saved were two percula clowns

[Scoobaman17]

that sux majorly. Hope everything turned out ok afterwords.

[NwG]

Power out and checkvalve failed.. 45g of water on the floor.. Thats about the worst..

Oh, I was running some new wires under the house so I had the tank off.. I had the new breaker installed in the box and the wires connected to the breaker already, but the breaker off... I was under the house and the space was very small and I needed both hands.. So I wrapped the wires onto my belt loop.. Well.........
The girlfriend came home and noticed the tank was off, She went to the breaker box, and noticed the tripped breakers (she didn't see me, I was under the house!) Well she flipped the breaker! I nearly K.O.ed myself when my head hit the foundation and had a nice size hole in my Arse from the shock....
She is no longer to touch the breaker box :(
Nate D

[TippyToeX]

Oddly enough my home owners insurance covered me pretty well. The loss of the livestock was not covered, and to this day I feel awful about their death.

I set up another tank about 6 months later. :D

[SeanySean]

I lost charlie, A fuzzy dwarf, he had so much character. It was worse because they are my fav fish and I, yes me, killed him, by rushing things when I first got the tank

[Scoobaman17]

when my tank stand caught on fire due to the sparks, I imidiatly went for the cords to unplug them, not thinking of my own safty. Being shocked from that much electricity really is a pain.

[zemuron114]

i've been shocked more times then i can count :) One really bad! knocked me on my a$$... lol

i lost my 30 inch snowflake, 8 inch lion, and 5 inch puffer, all in a week due to bad cocktail shrimp... sad week :(

[Electrobes]

I've flown about 6-8 feet backwards after touching a tank's water, when the skimmer pump's coild had split wide open. Talk about adding insult to injury, I smacked into the corner of another tank and nearly split my head open... ahh the fun working at a fish store.

[55gSW]

I had my volitans lionfish in a 40g hospital tank with a few pieces of rock in there and some sand. My family and I went out for a couple of hours and when we came home we found that the tank had busted and there was a huge mess and a dead lionfish on the floor. Almost quit the hobby right there....he was such a cool fish and I was really attached to him.:(

[froguy00]

My condy anemone got sucked through a powerhead and wiped out all of my fish except for my clownfish.

[sinkingbeach]

The first week I set up my current tank with my first sump and first hob(uncovered)overflow, Mr. Turbo Snail climbs up and over the teeth and into the overflow u-tube clogging it. As you can imagine water started to crawl over the lip of the tank and free fall on to our carpet. I was in the living room at the time, my thought process went blank and it took me a few moments to register what was actually going on, it was quite surreal at the time just watching gallons of water spill on to the carpet:eek1: while my wife started yelling at me to "stop standing there and do something":rolleyes:.

[JC Pollman]

My refugium and sump are 30 gal connected containers. I was not happy with the temperature fluctuations in the system, so I put the heating elements in the refugium and the sensors in the sump. This worked very well until the circulation pump stopped. The sensors kept telling the heaters to heat, and the heaters obeyed. When I got home, the water in the refugium was so hot I could not put my hand in it. I had to empty the ice maker into it :eek1: Fortunately none of the water entered the tank, but the refugium residents were really cooked.

[phlipper84]

I had a 75g reef tank with a wet dry, this was in the early 90's so forgive me, and two cannister filters, 1 eheim & 1 fluval. Anyway I had cleaned out the cannisters, done my water change started everything up and went to bed. The next morning I get up and there is 60 gallons of water on the floor of my apt. Actually less because it was going through the floor and pouring into the carport underneath my apt. My dogs are both sitting on the couch looking at the lake and wondering "what's this about then!" I promptly shut the power off to all the plug strips and start yanking out all the cannisters when there is a knock on the door and the landlord asks me if something is leaking as water is pouring down into the carports. Anyway I was working at a fish store, so I ran to the store and wrote down about 500 dollars worth of stuff on the back of my time card, throw the new pump, valves and ocean clear cannister into the back of my car along with the stores wet-vac. Go racing home and as I am turning into the driveway, this big monster cadillac that is parked in front of the fire hydrant pulls out into the street by way of my passenger door. Anyway, Do I win?

[petedoc]

OK, This was a bad one. I awoke in the middle of the night a few years ago when my 4 year old son came to tell me that my aquarium was making a weird noise. My 135 gal glass tank had cracked in the middle front pane after the cross-brace gave way. Lots of water on the floor and a really fishy smell was the result. I won't own a glass tank again!

[phlipper84]

Here, here to acrylic! The same tank that had the canisters leak on me suffered a fate worse than death, well alright it was death, when user-error (me) happened. I was doing some cleaning and instead of just lifting the lid on the canopy I decided I needed to flip up the whole canopy and leave it balanced on the back braces of the canopy. Somehow the whole thing slid off the back of the tank and landed on a bulkhead, cracking the back of the tank. Luckily, because it was acrylic it did not shatter only split like 6 inches on either side of the bulkhead. I promptly started emptying the tank and put myself out of the reef business for 9 years.

[illnino]

ive got a lot

1- about a year ago, i got a used 55g and 45g with everything. i was setting it up in my room(downstairs luckily) i filled the 45g with my python. i had the water from the sink on full blast at that point it was 2/3 full. then my sister called me up for dinner. i remember i ate a nice taco salad and watched tv for 40ish minutes. i somehow remembered i left the water on. i walked down to my room hoping i turned it off. it was apparent by the completely soaked carpet in my room and every room surrounding my room that i didnt turn it off. the funny thing is that i did the same thing 4, count them 1,2,3,4 hours later. only with 5 gallons though. it turned out that i had to move into the excersize room for a couple weeks while my carpet was torn up and replaced along with that came the pain of moving 5 tanks out.

recently i was doing a water change on my 29g reef. i forgot to drill a hole in the return tube out of pure laziness and it got a few gallons on the floor. i drilled a hole in the tube right after that happened

very recently i came down to my room and noticed there was some dribbles of water on my reefs glass i was wondering how my little damsel or my pseudochromis could splash thta much to make water come down. and again i believe that out of pure laziness to make a snail gaurd, a snail surfed over the overflow tube causing the tank to overflow about three gallons. i fixed that last night with a diy snail gaurd consisting of a piece of small acrylic that sat in the tube with two "wings" angled downwards to keep those huge turbos of mine off. i have since then ovserved two turbos surf up the trap... two possible more mistakes that were saved.