Tank Crash! Why & How To Prevent?!

Pufferpunk said:
I always have a 33g Brute can with salt mixed, ready for any emergency. As soon as I use it for a WC, I make up a new one.


Only crash I ever had was when I left Hubby to care for my tanks over the weekend. He thought the puffers looked hungry all the time (they are excellent beggars) & kept feeding them. I came home to bloated puffers floating at the top, mouths sticking out of the water, gasping for air. Multiple WC & Bio-Spira saved them.
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ouch
 
We had a frag tank that we built a section for anemones in so we could sell them. Everything was fine for 2 months then i get a call stating the tank was all cloudy. aparently one squeezed out a small opening and right into the powerhead, we lost aprox 100 frags and a yellow tang we had in there to keep it clean.
 
only happened to me once about 3 years ago with my 125 gallon mixed reef. i was relatively un-experienced so i just broke everything down lol :withstupid: but now my 75 mixed is thriving :yes4:
 
Wojtek said:
My advise is to have some kind of battery back up in case you lose power when you are not home, or sleep at night. I came home one day and almost had a hart attack! No power, and close to $1000 in fish dead. Next day I bought a battery backup for my vortech pumps.
As far as corals go I've seen a lot of people having problems with dosing pumps. I would recommend cleaning them on regular basis. This happened to a friend of mine. His pump over dosed alk and his corals turned white.
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http://www.apc.com/solutions/display.cfm?id=AA86862C-C729-4A9B-BA3B54CEEEF50128&ISOCountryCode=us
 
Averageguys said:
We had a frag tank that we built a section for anemones in so we could sell them. Everything was fine for 2 months then i get a call stating the tank was all cloudy. aparently one squeezed out a small opening and right into the powerhead, we lost aprox 100 frags and a yellow tang we had in there to keep it clean.
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that sounds nasty :blink: sorry to hear that.
 
I recently had a swing and wiped out 75% off my SPS and Chalices. Luckily there was pre made water and did a good wc. I thought I could get away with no skimmer for a couple weeks while I set up a new skimmer up and overfed without realizing it.
 
had a nem go nuclear in my nuvo 16 not sure if it got sucked into my mp10 or just didnt like my tank.. but it wiped everything out except two things.. nxt time when i add a nem in will keep it in a critter keeper or a breeder thing in the tank and moniter it b4 releasing in..so if it does die.. it'll be in a contained area..
 
Averageguys said:
We had a frag tank that we built a section for anemones in so we could sell them. Everything was fine for 2 months then i get a call stating the tank was all cloudy. aparently one squeezed out a small opening and right into the powerhead, we lost aprox 100 frags and a yellow tang we had in there to keep it clean.
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this is recurring problem i see, something getting stuck in fan
 
I recently had a tank crash also. It was a horrible site. I wanted to clean some algea off a couple rocks. After I cleaned them I put them back in the tank did a 5 g WC and added fresh carbon. But woke up in the morning to a cloudy tank.

Luckily I didn't work that day so I was able to save my fish and sum of my sps. Big thanks to Walt!
But lost 90% of my high end sps. It was a bad day.
 
Just a couple weeks ago I was out of town and my jbj heater controller went on the fritz not reading the right temp resulting in 100 degree water. Had some fish baking in there :( really sucked!!! But like others I always have water made up so cleaned it out and did a nice water change. Lost approx $800 in fish. I no longer use jbj controller as my friends also went out, switched to blueline and so far so good. Slowly restocking the tank back up. I did have 7 survivors on the bright side!
 
Even though I've kept various aquaria nearing 30 years now, I've been so afraid of this happening. My coworker/buddy who has kept reef aquariums for about 10 years and was the direct influence to convincing me to start a reef said it's not a matter of if, but when will it crash. I'm hoping he's wrong but I've seen too many posts about wipeouts and stuff. The best we can do is keep our maintenance routines going, make sure we have backups for all of our equipment (pumps, heaters, etc), as well as a solution for when the power goes out. I'm a firm believer in keeping it simple, and also doing weekly water changes.
 
The reefer said:
I recently had a tank crash also. It was a horrible site. I wanted to clean some algea off a couple rocks. After I cleaned them I put them back in the tank did a 5 g WC and added fresh carbon. But woke up in the morning to a cloudy tank.

Luckily I didn't work that day so I was able to save my fish and sum of my sps. Big thanks to Walt!
But lost 90% of my high end sps. It was a bad day.
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An Apex Controller might've prevented this.
 
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