I lost almost all my coral of the last year, then my APEX blew up while I was on vacation and what had survived died. My fish are still going and I'm slowly building tank back. I still don't have any automation due to APEX failure and doing things manually is taxing me a lot, but I will survive and so will my tank. I love it too much as do my wife and kids. It's just a part of us all now.

update: I thought the other clownfish was dead as she was laying on sand.

It turns out she is still alive.

After 2 water changes, she is now swimming but not taking any food yet..

she, her partner and YWG are the only reason I care about the tank.

At this point, I just don't care about corals..

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I think about it from time to time. I think the amount of money I have put into this hobby is what keeps me in it.

About 6-7 years ago I had a planted tank running and I accidentally killed everything while travelling due to accidental CO2 overdose. That made me give up planted tanks and try a marine tank instead.

i feel i lose interest sometimes, especially when things are not going well in the tank or at home. i just dumb it down to the bare necessities, water changes and cleaning the equipment. i snap out of it after a while and am happy i still have my tank up. i had stopped for years and regretted it due to the cost of starting up again. the only reason i started up again was i was given a tank ready to go. Even that brought it's own problems, but i toughed it out. now my tank looks good and even my Blue Hippo Tang stopped giving me grief.

**keep your rocks alive until you are sure you want to shut down. once they die, it is time consuming and frustrating work to clean the death off them so you can reuse them.**

I'll be quitting any day now.

And how many years have you been telling yourself that particular story eh!!

I did quit, upgraded a 75 that was running great for a 125 that was a nightmare. Battled everything and finally threw in the towel. It was just too much work and I realized I would come home and dread having to work on the tank or spending the weekends picking out hair algae, more than I enjoyed it.

I think that was 2009. I know have a month old 90 gallon inwall. So far so good, I think taking my time planning it and getting good equipment has helped a lot. Also putting it in the wall means it'll be a ton of work taking it down so when I do get frustrated I will realize it'll be more work getting rid of it than it will be fixing it.

I get angry. I want to see growth and colour out of my corals, this doesn’t always happen. That being said I don’t want to quit, but I definitely want to see improvements. My struggle is with phosphate management. As for now the fish are all healthy and nothing has died recently. This keeps me moving forward in this hobby.

In my very limited experience (6 years give or take) I have finally come to therms with a couple facts. The first being that we all fool ourselves by saying this is a hobby. In reality it is no more than a bad investment.....and a burning passion. The second thing I have learned is loss seems to sadly be a rite of passage.
We start out, and things are going well. Then we get complacent,cocky or we "over tinker" trying to tease that extra shot of color, or there are dosing pump failures, power failures, disease, bugs.Whatever the caause, things suddenly go to hell. The Coral Gods have stepped in to remind you who is really in control.
I have failed far more often than I have succeeded. But instead of throwing in the towel the first time I contemplated such a thing as I stared at my now shredded, fishless display, and coral strewn about it as though I had let my kids swim in the tank from removing fish for Ich treatment, man I was crushed.
Then I realized that I did enjoy the "hobby", that I enjoyed the challenge, and as so many have said, the time and money invested to that point hardly justified walking away. I then started re-assessing everything and started looking at my issues as an opportunity to do things to the tank I wasn't able to do before. Change mobile inhabitants, rearrange the rock the way I wanted, change my sump design, and.....hell.....why not just go to a bigger tank??? LMMFAO
Failure is only a negative if we have not learned from it. The single greatest resource, is other reefers, and their painful accounts of "life gone wrong". Take their experiences and learn from them. Learn from your mistakes. Find the common threads to failure, crashes etc and avoid them. For me, it is the complete abandonment of dosing pumps, as they seem to be the single largest contributors to crashes. Quarantine, Quarantine, and then Quarantine some more.
Most important is to always remember that none of us is immune to disaster, none of us are infallible, and we all walk that razor's edge while we try to "play master creator" in our own little oceans.That is what keeps me going, the delicate balance, the sheer fleeting pleasure of a good result, the pain of failure....it all goes hand in hand. That is reefing. We are all "that special kind of crazy". That is why we reef. Chin up. Good Luck

Thanks! Yeah I have to admit I was cocky..

corals are still dying now and I feel like I have to wait till things calm down in the tank.

I have had minor set-backs before but never to this.. All SPS are gone now.. frogspawn and hammers are shrinking..

At this moment, I don't even have any desire to check the water.. I think chasing numbers causes death of fishes..

At least, all of RFAs are OK for now.

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