What's the dumbest thing you've done?

[Der_Iron_Chef]

Since people are saying things are slow, might as well throw another question/poll out there.

SO...what's the dumbest thing you've ever done in regards to your aquarium? I'll start.

My sea hare was stuck in the intake of my Seio 1100 pump. I panicked and pulled the pump out without turning it off. It shot a nice stream across the livingroom before I came to my senses.

[Phanman]

Well I was so excited when i bought my first amount of LR for the first time I dumped a few large rocks into a FULL tank of water and guess what.... water all over the floor, .

[Kryten]

How about taking all the sand from someone else's established tank that had been shut down and putting it in mine without rinsing it or anything because I wanted 'live sand'. What a bad smell, for days, major ammonia! Thankfully, I had all my livestock in a different tank during this time or I'm sure it would have been a disaster.

[Phanman]

well i do this on a weekly basis, lol. Choke on salt water and swallowing it sometimes when I suck to hard on the tube when i siphon water during a water change. The best is when i got my gf to do this one time, and boy did i get an ear full, lol. Oh well it was worth it

[christyf5]

oh god where do I start

Hmm, 6 hour interceptor treatment to kill an acro eating crab), turned off the return pump (put one colony with an acropora crab in the sump. Forgot to turn off the ca reactor which took water from my tank and put in the sump. Overflowed the sump and reduced the level in my tank by about 6 inches. Killed all the frags I was trying to save from the crab and half a large colony. Never did kill the crab.

Adjustments to skimmer made before bed = overflow. I did this about 3x before I finally learned (slow learner).

I think I'll save myself the embarrassment in continuing...

[Pier Pressure]

We have only been in the fishkeeping hobby for two years and it is so hard to choose what was the absolute dumbest thing. There have been so many!

I think maybe my initial mistake was my worst. I bought a 150 gallon aquarium as a "starter kit" because I had heard the water stayed more stable. We lost many fish before we finally discovered we did not have enough filtration action to properly keep the tank circulated.

Well, go big or go home I always say. So we are now running a Reena XP3 together with a Fluval X5 on that tank.

Saltwater screw ups? Don't get me started!

[Scavenger]

Stupidest thing I've done is get into a hobby that sucks money, time and energy faster than all my pumps put together.

[Delphinus]

Oh so many things. (See my signature !!) Where do I even begin.

I think one of them has to be checking to see if the "thing that was causing an electrical problem" was what I turned off, by sticking my hand in the water. <zap> "Um nope it was something else that's still on! Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow somebody please pull me away from the tank ow ow ow ow ow ow". Now that I think of it it's a little like checking for a gas leak with a match. Yes it can tell you whether there is a problem, yes there are better ways to check.

Other things .. It's always the shortcuts and the temporary things that get you. Or the things you do just before bed.

I don't run a beckett skimmer without a collection cup anymore (because once it's full it stops letting the skimmer produce foam). And if no collection cup I run the skimmer in the sump, so if it overflows it overflows into the tank. Things you learn the hard way!

One horrible mistake I made as a rookie, I put a float valve for topup on my reef, it was just hooked up to my household cold water supply. Never ever hook a topup on a SW up to an infinite water supply! What a mess that was. Of course it failed at night. On a related note, it's amazing what can survive being in cold FW for hours on end (that you think couldn't survive such a thing) and it might surprise you what can't.

One that I still feel really bad about, I moved a cleaner shrimp from one tank to another. I had done this so many times I got complacent about acclimitizing. Well it turns out if your salinity deviates by 0.002 (eg., 1.023 versus 1.025), this will kill a shrimp instantly. And I do mean instantly, you may as well drop them in boiling water. Always drip acclimate even if you think your source and destination waters are "close enough" - they aren't!

I could go on but I'll stop to save what's left of my dignity!

[kwirky]

I made so many mistakes with my first 18g nano reef tank.

I had to do a water change and I didn't want to mix up the saltwater separately. So I added water straight from the tap, dumped in some prime, and put the salt in and watched it slowly mix before my eyes.

3/4 of my frags died

I once rearranged my rockwork, then thought "where'd all my snails go?" and then scoured the rock over and found I had most of them compacted on the bottom of most of the rocks...

When I first got my mag 700 I wanted to see how fast it was but I didn't have my tank ready yet. I did it in the bathroom sink. That was a mess

[jordsy]

just 3 weeks ago i came up with a design for a trap to catch those bristle worms. I used caulking to seal the holes in my trap but it was type of caulking to seal seams in the walls of houses for looks. It wasnt water proof and it leaked through out my 90 gal tank. I had to change all the water.... not fun