What's the dumbest thing you've done to your tank?

[FutureInterest]

So... I've done many dumb things to my tank over the years... but recently I broke all my records.

I've been dosing nitrates for 6 months now and it has been pretty cut and dry. A month ago I noticed that some corals were not looking great... it was odd. Others were thriving and some just weren't. I checked all my parameters and everything looked fine. So I chalked it up to new salt that I was trying out. A week later a few coral died and that's when I began to consider that my parameters were not correct and I sent a sample off to ATI for ICP testing... of course that takes 2 weeks... and other things were suffering in the meantime. I ordered new test kits and found out that my nitrate test kit was expired... and I didn't notice and it wasn't giving back correct readings. Here I was increasing my nitrate dosing when in fact I should've been doing the opposite...

So guess what my nitrates were at?

600 ppm. No joke. I'm honestly surprised everything didn't die.

The hard part there was getting the water back down. When I do water changes, water goes from my frag tank to my display and then from there it goes out so they were both at 600 ppm. It took basically doing 50% water changes over and over again to get it back to a reasonable level. That's a ton of water and salt!

So... if your nitrates are high there are some corals that will tip you off in advance. These include birdsnests, stylos, acans, cyphastreas, and duncans. These guys are a lot more nitrate sensitive than others. Even if you don't keep these kinds of corals, please consider doing so as they can tip you off early to a nitrate issue for sure.

Feel free to share and any lessons learned

 

[enderg60]

Oh there is an aptasia on that frag. Ill get it later.

 

[vols22]

Stirring the sand bed...

 

[Adam]

Hooking up a cheap kalk stirrer to my top off... on a system that goes through 3-5 gallons a day in the winter time. Came home to cloudy water and wondered what the hell was wrong. When I figured out what it was and the water finally settled out the tank looked like Tony Montana had a party in there.

 

[lizzyann]

This is the dumbest thing so far, but I'm still new to this, so I've got plenty more dumb things in my future I'm sure! When I first started my tank I had the normal new tank uglies, with lots of algae, but it kept getting worse and worse. I'd remove it for hours with tweezers every water change and it just kept coming back every week. Couldn't figure out what was wrong. Nutrients were fairly normal, not in front of a window or anything. After a few weeks I finally realized there's a dang skylight in the room that's shining right on the tank part of the day.
My green-haired beauty:

Closed the skylight and thankfully nothing was harmed in my oblivion. I'm sure my emerald crab would love for me to open it back up for a day or two!

 

[ichthyoid]

So... I've done many dumb things to my tank over the years... but recently I broke all my records.

I've been dosing nitrates for 6 months now and it has been pretty cut and dry. A month ago I noticed that some corals were not looking great... it was odd. Others were thriving and some just weren't. I checked all my parameters and everything looked fine. So I chalked it up to new salt that I was trying out. A week later a few coral died and that's when I began to consider that my parameters were not correct and I sent a sample off to ATI for ICP testing... of course that takes 2 weeks... and other things were suffering in the meantime. I ordered new test kits and found out that my nitrate test kit was expired... and I didn't notice and it wasn't giving back correct readings. Here I was increasing my nitrate dosing when in fact I should've been doing the opposite...

So guess what my nitrates were at?

600 ppm. No joke. I'm honestly surprised everything didn't die.

The hard part there was getting the water back down. When I do water changes, water goes from my frag tank to my display and then from there it goes out so they were both at 600 ppm. It took basically doing 50% water changes over and over again to get it back to a reasonable level. That's a ton of water and salt!

So... if your nitrates are high there are some corals that will tip you off in advance. These include birdsnests, stylos, acans, cyphastreas, and duncans. These guys are a lot more nitrate sensitive than others. Even if you don't keep these kinds of corals, please consider doing so as they can tip you off early to a nitrate issue for sure.

Feel free to share and any lessons learned

If the ratio of soluble organic carbon to soluble nitrogen in seawater drops below ~12:1, the nitrogen cannot be fully metabolized by bacteria. So, nitrogen may accumulate.
If you are dosing nitrate/nitrogen, I would suggest that you dose organic carbon as well, at least 12:1 (start slowly, methanol or ethanol are the most efficiently metabolized).
Bacteria use organic carbon as an energy source and require it to metabolize other nutrients, such as nitrogen or phosphorus. They consume it and are then exported via skimming.

 

[ichthyoid]

Below is a link to a technical article explaining the above in detail. In summary -

'The organic molecules composing the DOC pool have a C:N of 14 (10), compared with a Redfield C:N of 6.6 for plankton (3). Thus, the C:N of dissolved organics is approximately double the C:N of plankton, making DOC a nitrogen-efficient means to sequester carbon in the deep ocean.'

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/39/10736

 

[jcook54]

I added buffer to my tank because ph was always "low" at 7.9. According to the front of the label, it would increase ph to 8.3 without going over so there was NO WAY I could screw up the ph so I kept adding. It was on the back label (that I didn't bother with) where it stated it would, however, increase Alkalinity. No worries about going to high on ph but monitor alkalinity. It didn't take too long before I added yet another "dose" of buffer and the whole tank turned to milk. Precipitation even FTW. I put this particular dumb thing under the dumb theme of chasing numbers. My tank has a little lower ph and it's been just fine for years and years. I now longer chase the "perfect" number for anything and strive more for stability.

 

[snowmansnow]

Hmmmmm
Once long long ago in a galaxy far away I cut up a bunch of sps colonies because they had RTn on the base.

Well it was just fading from shade:/


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[Mom2Many]

Recently almost cooked my tank, because I did not have a themometor on the tank at all and never thought the trouble I was having was a heater stuck on. If I had a simple themometer on my tank, I am sure I would have caught it much sooner. Praise God in the end I only lost one corral so far and the others are slowly recovering. Looking into temp moniters.

 

[bhodges82]

I once put snails in my remote refugium to help me keep the glass clean. Apparently they fit perfectly in the drain line, at about 2am one night I finally got a chance to meet my downstairs neighbors, it rained 25 gallons of saltwater in their living room. Apparently nothing says “I’m sorry” like a couple cases of beer.

Lesson, cover ALL drain lines and have emergency drains too.


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[firethorn77]

Running without a temp controller. Cat knocked the probe out of the water. Killed everything. Thermometer thought it was 68 degrees. Tank hit nearly 100.

 

[fishlips]

Tried feeding my tank phytoplankton. After a 2 weeks, 120 ml total. tank covered with HA, Bacteria infection. Acropora dying. Opened fridge, checked the date on phyto, expired. Worst 3 months of my reefing career .

 

[vols22]

This is one of the funniest threads I have seen...but also one of the most educational.

 

[anthony]

Oh there is an aptasia on that frag. Ill get it later.

Lol.. yep

 

[AquariumSchmo]

Trusting refractometer calibration solution; in my defense, it was brand new though.

I noticed the corals were looking worse each week over the course of a couple of months. One by one, I made changes to my system, trying to figure out what was wrong. After many changes, I finally took some water to get tested and found out my salinity was 40 ppt.

 

[saltwaterwannabe]

Knocked the temperature controller out of the water and did not catch it untill temps were in the 90's, after stocking with a ton of coral and fish I bought from a member's massive tank breakdown. I lost just about everything I had bought from the member.

 

[lshin037]

Not really something I've done to the tank but dumb nonetheless. After a few weeks of using my Hannah calcium checker and used to seeing the purple/blue color, one day I freaked out because the color was red and read 200 ppm. Did the test twice and same reading. Couldnt find anything online for this irregularity so I used one of those reef calculators to see how much calcium chloride I would need to raise it from 200 to 400. Thankfully I noticed (just in time) that i didnt see my pipette out. Forgot to add the water sample.

 

[sharis100]

Not getting the largest tank possible when restarting the hobby. I have been through too many tank moves in the last year, now I am at a RS 250 and WB 70.2 which I decided needed to be tied together to a basement sump. Should have started with one big tank and saved myself a lot of time, effort and money. Oh well....

 

[FutureInterest]

It's funny to me that I've done almost everything on this thread thus far... Why oh why do I learn the hard way??

Try to learn from our mistakes folks!