what is your worst aquarium related screw up???

[Magnum Man26 141]

mine happened yesterday, and honestly it’s a mistake I keep repeating, but yesterday was the worst…

over flowing tanks… when I’m refilling them…
back when I raised tilapia outside, I would top off the 3 tank set up, with a 1/2 inch garden hose, and one time I let the water run accidentally for several hours, while I ran to town… the fish survived, but dropped the tanks in the whole 750 gallon system to the upper 50’s degrees, with the cold well water… it was really close to cold enough to kill all the fish… if I had killed 100 nearly adult tilapia , that still would have been my worst mistake…

but… yesterday with Mrs. current doctoring situation, I started to top off one of my 10 gallon hard water shrimp and small live bearer tanks in the morning using a 1/4 inch hard water line with well water… I forgot I started it, completely forgot, and after a full day of doctoring, I went right into farm animal chores, and pasture fencing… then supper preparation, I didn’t go back down stairs where my main tank group is until shower time before bed… the whole basement floor was wet… the opposite corner from the tanks has a floor drain, and the water eventually worked it’s way to that… the floor is mostly cement, with about half having vinyl flooring, and a half dozen rugs… a 1/4 inch line doesn’t flow enough to fill the basement, besides the floor drain would eventually prevent that.. I’ve yet to look at that particular tank, that had a fancy guppy breeding group, and my orange neocardia shrimp… I have over flowed these 10 gallon tanks before with no losses, but not litterally over flowed for 10-12 hours… I shut the water off last night, and will deal with the mess this morning… just feeling dumb, but with caring for my wife, and all I have going on with the rest of life, it just slipped my mind, that I had the fill water on at all…

this morning the rugs will go into the washer, and my little bank of fans will be incorporated into drying the floor, I’ll have to inspect, as I have water in places I never have had before , but basically everything was designed around an occasionally wet basement, any sheet rock on the walls are all gapped from the floor an inch, and none of the water got that deep…

someone tell me I’m not the only one to do stupid aquarium stuff???

 

[bgarthe26 44]

You are not, guaranteed, the only one “to do stupid aquarium stuff”. I have a few “stupid” moments in my many years of fish keeping.

Just last year, I had my 32g Brut RO garbage can on wheels being filled with RO water from the kitchen sink area. Well….duh….I got doing something (taking a nap) and much later heard my basement water alarms going off. The water had overflowed, gone through the floor, and had triggered alarms in the basement. Needless to say….our wet/dry vac and box fans were very busy for a while.

Going back a number of years, my #1 dumbest/biggest screw up was trying to move (I only wanted to move it half an inch) a mostly filled 20g fish tank. Oh my…..did it ever pop and all that water went on the hardwood floor. I was frantically trying to gather the flopping wagtail platies all over while my mom emptied the linen closet of towels onto the mess. You see, my father’s antique gun collection room was directly below my room.

 

[BullTerrierChild6 26]

I've had a few...
When I got my first fish tank, I let the water cycle for only a day and came home the next with 5 fish including a snowball pleco. They all died within a week, with a sunset dwarf gourami getting sucked into the filter at 11:59 of Christmas eve...

I also bought 3 festivums over a year ago, which were all bagged together in a very large bag. Upon heading home, I realized that the bag had a small leak in it. When I got home, I leaned the bag against my stand as I went to wash my hands. I heard a large splash on the ground and came back to find a burst open bag on my floor with 3 festivums in different directions. The water was everywhere so I couldn't acclimate them, I just picked them up and plopped them into the tank as quick as I could. I may've gotten spined.

I also once bought a large panther crab that brutally wiped out some of my fish like a Saw movie.
It ripped out the heart of a pleco, punctured a peacock eel, and captured one of the festivums mentioned above and started eating it. It survived and has been fine for over a year but is now missing a top jaw and fully relies on eating frozen livefoods.

 

[Donya5 6]

Oh I have a good one...

A long time ago I had a 55gal reef tank with a sump, but the sump was not under the tank like a normal setup. Instead, it was off to the side becuase it was a retro-fit thing that wouldn't work with the stand I had...becuase I had won a giant skimmer at a raffle that was about 1" too high. So I had a janky siphon-based overflow and and return pump setup, and also somehow had ended up with a return pump way more powerful than what I really needed at the time. I had just rigged up this side-sump mess and, as you can imagine, the hoses were all bendy because of what I'd done. I did not yet know that one needs to either seriously clamp the hoses or have some kind of rigid, straight line pipe that can't shift easily. The return pump started making a noise and return flow was dwindling, so I reached in and poked it. It must have been trapped air inside the pump, since that little boop I gave it caused a sudden surge of flow, and because the tubing was bendy and wanting to kink, the pump shot the outgoing tube right off like a rocket.

At that point, I still had my hand in the sump water and now had an incredible water jet going up past my face and across the room....landing right next to a surge protector...which was not on a GFCI becuase it was across the room...while the 55gal tank started siphoning itself onto the floor through the now-disconnected return tubing that creating a puddle that was expanding twoards me and the surge protector. The surge protector getting splashed started sending out sparks. I have never leaped out of a room and to a breaker box so fast.

I was living in a condo at the time. Fortunately there was noboy living below me and building management was practically non-existent, so I cleaned it up and no one else ever knew of the flood I made or that I almost electrocuted myself in the process. All the outlets got GFCIs after that.

 

[Beling]

I had water catchment from the roof, and when I changed water one day the fish looked so happy, until I got the feeling they were so UNhappy, swimming frantically (50 gal) and I smelled the water and it was foul. Maybe from bird poop? I hurriedly took out as much as I could and replaced with tap water (with water treatment chemicals for chlorine etc.) and the fish all settled down. So much for using Nature's water.

 

[Back in the fold]

I got some small Neon Tetra’s once because they were a great deal . I got a dozen for about ten bucks and took them home and put them in with my Angelfish because I thought everybody from South America would be great friends . I put them in and then had to go do something for a couple hours and then I came home happily expecting to see my new Neon Tetra’s looking colorful and happy and the only one left was one sticking out of the mouth of an Angelfish . The other Angels all had fat full bellies .
“ As God is my witness I swear I thought turkeys could fly . “

 

[GaryE25 140]

MIne was recent. It took me 60 years of fishkeeping to get to it.

I was given one of the big FX canister filters, and it's great. It had a broken intake hose, which I thought I'd fixed. I've run it for four years in a tank that has become more and more of a jungle. But the filter strainer was out of sight in the jungle of plants, and it detached. Open high suction intake hose...120 gallon full of hard to get expensive tetras... plus a large shoal of Hoplisoma melini.

That strainer will not detach again. Nor will I see those slowly and carefully collected together tetras again. I've replaced the Hoplisoma, but man, that one felt bad.

 

[Magnum Man26 141]

well those 10 gallon tanks aren’t set up for viewing, but I’m not seeing anything left in that tank, I thought maybe shrimp, but the well water is cold, so likely too cold for the guppies, and either too cold for the shrimp as well, or there is enough guppy carnage to eat on, that the shrimp are just not visible…

my Tiger Limia have outgrown their tank, with much breeding… now that the over flowed tank has returned to normal temperature, maybe I’ll put a few net fulls of limia fry in there??? and buy a new starter group of orange shrimp…

 

[Magnum Man26 141]

OK… there is still life in the flooded tank… bladder snails, for sure… I added a shrimp block trying to entice any left, into view… it got covered by snails… there might still be a few shrimp left, if guppy carnage was more appealing than shrimp blocks…

I guess it’s comforting to know the pest snails will survive my mistakes from a “too busy” life… they are the cockroaches of the aquarium world…