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It finally happened. Large snail plugged up the overflow and the tank overflowed. It is a total loss. I have one fish that survived. It is a yellow tang. Time to rebuild I suppose. Craptastic day.
Total reef crash.
- Thread starter wildernets
- Start date
Oh man, so sorry to hear that. Let us now if you decide to restart and need any help.
Sorry to hear that! Everybody goes through it at some point so don't give up. Having been there myself, I am big on redundancy. An emergency overflow, temperature controller with fans on sump, float switches on pumps, gfci breakers, battery backup, generator and the list goes on. Still no guarantee that something won't happen and truly sucks when it does.
Im so sorry. Im waiting for that day to come with my tank. Now matter how prepared you are horrible things can still happen. When your ready to fire it back up Ive got some coral to get you started.
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Thank you all for the kind words.
It has taken me some time to process the whole thing and get past the disappointment enough to type this up. I am detailing for a couple reasons. One closure of the event. Two hoping to remind or inform other reefers to my obvious mistakes and hope that it helps someone one day to think, "Nathan did that and it turned out poorly for him. I'll do something else."
Sometime Saturday night one of my large snails made his way into my overflow standpipe. This caused water to overflow from the top of the tank. This would not be completely tragic if not for the auto top off. Freshwater poured in to replace the overflowing saltwater. I have had the issue in the past but have caught them in time to rectify. In those times I had made improvements to the system to prevent issues in the future. My failure here is that I have recently moved and had set up the system in a temporary way that did not really have all these improvements incorporated in the current temp setup. That was failure one. Once I got to the tank everything was dead or almost dead except for a couple corals and two fish. There was really no way to save it so I simply started breaking things down. I moved the fish and few remaining corals to a large tub with powerhead and heater. Here is where I really started to add insult to injury.
I will say that I more under the weather this weekend than I have been in a long time. This is not an excuse but lends to the very poor decision-making that followed. I had a second, smaller tank. Biocube 14. I thought it best to try and "save" the remaining corals by putting them in this tank. For perspective, I decided to put large, stresses, dying, LPS corals in a super small tank to save them. We all know what happened here. A very large, all-out chemical war ensued. I tried water changes but I was no match. Started removing dying corals but again I was too late. The entire tank collapsed. Taking with it all my favorites. Most of the corals in this tank don't exist anywhere else that I know of. They were my backups from the larger tank. People, DO NOT try and save one tank's dying corals with another. Set up a new QT tank and use only that. Seems easy but the mistake can be made in the moment. I did not have QT setup as I have not added anything to my system in well over a year. There was no need.
At this point, I believe I have a couple zoas left. I lost about 50 SPS colonies. Some over 7 years old and about the size of a basketball. Scollis, a frogspawn I have had parts of for 10 years, etc, etc. The fish ended up dying before they could be picked up. I have had a reef tank in one form or another since 2001. This is the darkest time I have had in reef keeping by far. Please read my mistakes and don't make them on your systems. There are so many ways to avoid what I had happen, I cannot count them all. All of it could have been mitigated with a 50 cent piece of egg crate to block to overflow.
It has taken me some time to process the whole thing and get past the disappointment enough to type this up. I am detailing for a couple reasons. One closure of the event. Two hoping to remind or inform other reefers to my obvious mistakes and hope that it helps someone one day to think, "Nathan did that and it turned out poorly for him. I'll do something else."
Sometime Saturday night one of my large snails made his way into my overflow standpipe. This caused water to overflow from the top of the tank. This would not be completely tragic if not for the auto top off. Freshwater poured in to replace the overflowing saltwater. I have had the issue in the past but have caught them in time to rectify. In those times I had made improvements to the system to prevent issues in the future. My failure here is that I have recently moved and had set up the system in a temporary way that did not really have all these improvements incorporated in the current temp setup. That was failure one. Once I got to the tank everything was dead or almost dead except for a couple corals and two fish. There was really no way to save it so I simply started breaking things down. I moved the fish and few remaining corals to a large tub with powerhead and heater. Here is where I really started to add insult to injury.
I will say that I more under the weather this weekend than I have been in a long time. This is not an excuse but lends to the very poor decision-making that followed. I had a second, smaller tank. Biocube 14. I thought it best to try and "save" the remaining corals by putting them in this tank. For perspective, I decided to put large, stresses, dying, LPS corals in a super small tank to save them. We all know what happened here. A very large, all-out chemical war ensued. I tried water changes but I was no match. Started removing dying corals but again I was too late. The entire tank collapsed. Taking with it all my favorites. Most of the corals in this tank don't exist anywhere else that I know of. They were my backups from the larger tank. People, DO NOT try and save one tank's dying corals with another. Set up a new QT tank and use only that. Seems easy but the mistake can be made in the moment. I did not have QT setup as I have not added anything to my system in well over a year. There was no need.
At this point, I believe I have a couple zoas left. I lost about 50 SPS colonies. Some over 7 years old and about the size of a basketball. Scollis, a frogspawn I have had parts of for 10 years, etc, etc. The fish ended up dying before they could be picked up. I have had a reef tank in one form or another since 2001. This is the darkest time I have had in reef keeping by far. Please read my mistakes and don't make them on your systems. There are so many ways to avoid what I had happen, I cannot count them all. All of it could have been mitigated with a 50 cent piece of egg crate to block to overflow.
Again, so sorry to here of the losses.
When you restart are you going to use the same tank and drain design? If you start with a new approach to the drains I'd be more than happy to help you with the plumbing.
When you restart are you going to use the same tank and drain design? If you start with a new approach to the drains I'd be more than happy to help you with the plumbing.
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For now, I am simply going to set up the 35 cube. It is normal 3/4" in and 1" out. The larger tank in the living room will be more properly planned. Thanks for the offer. I am not sure when the bigger tank will be.
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