Stupid mistakes can still happen after years in hobby!

As many on here know, I have not had the best of luck with my reef tanks..... tank leaking, breaking,etc. I have been in this hobby for many years and have kept many tanks, from small nanos, medium to large reefs, to breed specific tanks such as peacock mantis and even octopus.

Well, since our last tank breakage, we have been regrowing our stock in various nano tanks with plans to move to our new tank soon. We have an LPS only tank, a zoa tank and a very well stocked all SPS tank with many harder to find corals.

Well the SPS tank had grown so much that they were begining to sting each other and encrust over each other. We are a couple weeks away from our new tank install ;D so I decided to do some aquascaping and rearrainging the SPS tank. I made up a big water change to do afterwards, had prime on hand and was ready to go.

Here is where the stupid comes in. We had bought a bunch of dried base rock with plans to seed it in our broke tank in preparation of the new build. We had this really nice, large piece of rock that I thought would be cool in the 28g tank. The whole 5% rule went right out of my mind, instead it was probably good 40% of the rock in the tank. After I got the rockwork done, did a large 10g water change and turned the lights off. Everything seemed fine.

Day 1 things looked like they were still settling in after the change, but didnt think too much (was still dealing with a lot of personal stuff!) Day 2 I turn on the light and notice major RTN going on. My helfrich firefish is missing, I find my dragon blenny laying on the ground, my stripped gobies are gone, clown goby, my fireshrimp etc. The only thing I found swimming was my picasso clown.

Then it hit me.........OMG I caused a MAJOR CYCLE! Tested ammonia and it was over 1. CRAP!! Added Prime and did several water changes. We decided it would be best to leave the corals where they were versus stressing them more by moving them to a new tank, instead concentrate on getting toxins down.

After serial water changes and lots of tears, today things are looking better. My clown is swimming and eating, one of my fireshrimp came out, my crabs are cleaning up. The corals I have left have polyps out. (though there is major tissue lost on over 80% of the corals).......

What we lost so far:
Red Planet, Blue Tenius, couple milipora, red chalice. 4 various acro frags, setosa, a couple acan along with the above mentioned fish.

Posting this in hopes of maybe helping someone learn from my mistake. Sad part about it, was I KNOW THE RULE. I simply did not think before I did it

and yes, I did this ALL BY MYSELF with no help for anybody else! And I appreciate the fact that the other person is not rubbing my nose in my stupidity!:

 

Sorry to hear of your trouble. We all seem to get overconfident in spite of our experiences and all the advice we seek. Hope all recovers.

 

sad news Mel

hopefully everything else makes it through this OK for you
some very nice corals involved which makes it all the more harder to take

Steve

 

It is very easy to get complacent when we get into the routine of things. I'm glad you shared your experience though, because I can guarantee you that someone will read about this and think "oh, wait, what am I doing?"

 

Awww dang,so sorry to hear..hope everything works out ok..A while back I was mounting a large monti cap to a different rock, and two bowls of water one fresh ro/di(was using it to rinse something else) and one salt(to help speed up cluing time). I glued the coral to the rock placed it in the wrong bowl placed it back into the tank,woke up the next day to a dead coral and couldn't figure out at first what happened..ugh it stills bothers me to this day it was such a nice piece...again hope it all works out..these thing happen..

 

This just happen to me a couple of months ago: I had a New monoporia frag , moved it so I could putty it down. Turned around, turned back and the coral was gone. I never found it, that lasted a couple days.

Happens to us all, don't let the man get you down.

 

thanks everyone for the well wishes.......
but today woke up to my large strawberry shortcake, sunset monti. purple/pink chalice, chili pepper monti all rtn.

I now realize we are going to loose everything in that tank......over 1,000 worth of corals. Trying to not let this get me down, but it is Will rebuild however but kills me to think about everything that I killled

 

Im really sorry to hear about your loss. Can I ask what exactly happened with the tank breakage?

 

the first 135g tank was "professionally installed" and was not leveled. It completely blew out one seam (from top to bottom of tank) Was able to save some stuff from that disaster.

6 months later (new 125g tank) we had a JBJ digital heater that overnight went on blitz shot temp to over 98 degrees. Killed everything. We had the heater in the sump and got so hot that it broke the glass in the overflow. the only thing that survived that heat was an acan that is now lost in this tank

 

Wow that is a big loss to hear about especially from someone new like me but then I think any loss is big,hope your able to recover from the loss in time.
As a rule murpheys law always applies.