Epic Tank Fail Stories

[Teelabrown]

So when my best friend was about 4 she thought her Daddy's fish smelled bad and dumped half a bottle of bath beads in. Her sister had a thing with dials and the next (and last) tank got a day at the spa when she found the dial on the heater. I have another friend who's son suffocated his tank by feeding them...the ENTIRE large jar of fish food.

I'd love to hear your stories.

[SlukBunWalla]

I had a customer who had family visiting for the holidays and his very young niece dumped a bowl of yogurt in his tank. He sent his wife in for water to do a huge water change, skimmed like crazy, and ran carbon...and still lost all his fish. Miraculously most of his corals made it through.

Another customer had his heater malfunction and of course it failed in the on position and OF COURSE it was while he was away. It cooked everything in his tank for a couple of days and when he came into his apartment he said he'd never smelled anything like that in his life. He lost every living thing in his tank that had been running for well over four years.

Working in a LFS I've heard every horror story out there, and it scares me to think that even with every precaution it could happen to any one of us at any time.

[lougotzz]

I had a friend living with his parents, and he had a destructive little brother. He was about 6 or so. My friend came from NY to PA for the weekend to hang out since I left NY.bI have to go back to NY with him to take him home. We get in his room and his tank is just destroyed. The little brother said he thought pooring an entire bottle of colone into the tank would make it smell better..

[gowingsgo]

I had a 100 gallon tank split at the seam well I was out of town for a week. It smelled so bad when I open up the door I new some thing was wrong then I stepped in the door onto wet carpet Total loss

[Shane Hoffman]

I got two. One is a friend who found a "great deal" on a 300 with a cracked side panel. He had it "professionally replaced" By his brother who works at an auto body shop. 7 months later and my friend is in bed. He heard a big bang followed by gushing water. The whole panel flipped out like it was on a door hinge. It just swung open. It actually stayed connected on the fron side. He had 40 gallons of salt water mixed in the basement. He grabbed all fish and coral and through them in a brute container of 70 degree water. Called a LFS owner at home at 3 in the morning and asked if he could bring everything into the store. He had $3500 dollars worth of fish and coral. In the end all he lost was a HUGE Jumbo Yellow Tang and a leather coral.....


The other is my story....Back when my tank was a fowlr I had 15 fish and a sea apple. The tank was 6 months old (my first tank).....I had never lost a fish and was beggining to get a real chip on my shoulder and couldnt understand how people had fish die all the time.......I had been warned about the sea apple but didnt care. I read everything I could and was certain I could keep it. I had it for about a month. No fish had ever touched it. Its first week in the tank I would spend 3 or 4 hours a day just making sure nothing messed with it. One day I come home and had 4 dead fish floating. All the other fish looked like they had skin peeling off. Some in small spots and some the whole body was full of bubbly peeling skin. Over the next 3 days I lost all my fish except a domino damsel and my yellow box/cow fish of all things. I wasnt sure what was wrong. All my parameters were perfect when I found the first four fish dead. I was certain it wasnt low oxygen because I have a ton of flow and surface agitation. I decided to remove the sea apple because he was the only suspect I had. Sure enough when I removed him I could see his back side. There was a huge jusnk of flesh missing about the size of a nickel. The wound was really deep. I could see this white muscle looking tissue. It was all very sad.......and NO I will never own another seapple.......

[SunnyX]

Originally posted by lougotzz
I had a friend living with his parents, and he had a destructive little brother. He was about 6 or so. My friend came from NY to PA for the weekend to hang out since I left NY.bI have to go back to NY with him to take him home. We get in his room and his tank is just destroyed. The little brother said he thought pooring an entire bottle of colone into the tank would make it smell better..

I sucks that these crashes had to happen, but that story is just too funny!

[Teelabrown]

I did have a great little system once. It was just a fresh water bowl, about 2 gallons, still water. I had a golden snail, beta, ghost shrimps, some random feeder fish, and two mollys. I LOVED that silly little tank and it was doing REALLY well. The feeder fish were even breeding! No air stone, no filter, nothing. Just really regular water changes with slightly warm water. I didn't know about copper from hot water at the time.

Well, one day I was in a big hurry and really needed to do a water change and rushed it. I'd like to blame it on something other than my own stupidity, but I totally didn't check the temperature of the change water and boiled the poor tank. Because I was in a hurry, I left and didn't catch the problem. I came back to dead fishies and one highly-irked snail.

[billdogg]

My first tank (20+ years ago) was a 55g - no sump, undergravel filter with (Wow - these are cool) powerheads, and N.O. lighting (2 x 48" 40w T12).. I had 54 different critters in there. both soft and hard corals, shrooms, gorgonians, a couple clams, shrimp. lobster, crabs, a few anemones, and a wide assortment of fish. All if which, knowing what I now know after all this time is the hobby, i wouldn't keep in several separate larger systems.

Anyway - on to the crash (that i never saw coming)

I live in central ohio - went up to the family cottage on Put-in-Bay for a long weekend - left my girlfriend in charge with several pages of detailed instructions, including the # of the LFS i worked part time at and the # of the cottage (just in case)

This was the first weekend in August. In Columbus, that means 90 or so. This week it was in the low 100's. The very first day when she came over, everything looked fine. As she was leaving something caught her eye. Silly me had left the A/C on, so she turned it off to save me a couple bucks on my bill.


Anybody wanna guess how this turns out?????????

I got home after a great week at about 7pm, and nearly burnt my hand on the back door (facing east). I thought the place was on fire. When I opened the door, the wave of stench hit me. It was a total loss, of course.
The temp inside the house was somewhere in the mid 140's - don't know exactly where - the thermometer didn't go that high. The remains of the fish were flaky, as if they had been cooked.

She came over a little later, and seeing me along side the house with a hose running in my window asked - "What's the matter???" I was speechless. When I explained the problem, her reply was "well, i'll just have my daddy buy you more next week" I am not a violent person, but still struggled to restrain myself.

Ironically, I had spent the week up there coming to the realization that it would never work out for us and it was time to move on. If only I'd figured that out a couple weeks earlier!

Anybody top that??? ( i hope not)

[xtm]

I call this the "Great Rio Disaster of 04". I had been using a Rio 800 on my 75g for about 6 months... no problem. Until I came home one night and the tank is black.. just black. Like someone poured black paint on it. As it turns out, my Rio pump had exploded while IN the sump. The epoxy thingy on the back of the pump burst open and leaked tar all over the tank. All fishes died, and if I recall correctly, only my GSP's survived. Never again.

[username in use]

Gotta love those star polyps. I have a feeling that after all out nuclear war, the only thing that will survive are cocroaches and star polyps.

[Eff Ewe]

Originally posted by gowingsgo
I had a 100 gallon tank split at the seam well I was out of town for a week. It smelled so bad when I open up the door I new some thing was wrong then I stepped in the door onto wet carpet Total loss

Oh man this is my worse nightmare.

[Garage1217]

Mine is simple... A phone call...
Wife- Hey honey, I cleaned the tank and everything does not look happy

me - Well did you bump anything or what exactly did you do?

Wife - Well I cleaned the glass with the mag float thing & the sand looked dirty so I stirred it up really good so it could go in the filter.

me - ...... you..... stirred it all up?..................................

Yeah that pretty much sums up my nano crash years ago.

[bobbyjeb]

The tank had two large jack dempsys when i got in the shower. When I got out I noticed they were gone I looked on the floor... behind the tank...My five y/o told me they were fighting! He had put them in time out. In his room, on the pillow. Blanket fuzz, blond hair, dog hair, and cheerios were stuck to them. I dropped them in the tank and watched them swim on thier side for a while. Tuff buggers. And very "loving". They fought four more years after that.
Not really a crash...but funny story

[lougotzz]

Originally posted by Garage1217
Mine is simple... A phone call...
Wife- Hey honey, I cleaned the tank and everything does not look happy

me - Well did you bump anything or what exactly did you do?

Wife - Well I cleaned the glass with the mag float thing & the sand looked dirty so I stirred it up really good so it could go in the filter.

me - ...... you..... stirred it all up?..................................

Yeah that pretty much sums up my nano crash years ago.

[lougotzz]

I put my friends disaster in there, but I forgot to put my own LOL. When I was young, like 12, I was just getting into fish. Fresh water. I didnt know about ammonia and nitrite and all that stuff, so I was talking to my friend who gave me the tank and fish, and he told me about it. Well, when your 12, and you see individual test kits at 10 dollars each, you kinda know your not gonna be able to buy them. So instead, you make your way over to the ammonia tablets. I figured, "hey, their only $4.99, its all good." So I picked these up, and dropped one into my tank. The next day I notice a Tinfoil Barb has slightly red gills. So I start flipping out, assuming the fish now has ammonia burn from hearing about ammonia like a day ago, (remember, no test kit) so I add another tablet. Then I come home from school, add another tablet. Maybe I go out and play, I come home, you know it, add another tablet. Well I went through a box of like 12 tablets in a day. The next day the tank was so cloudy and destroyed, I figured I better borrow my friends cyphon (yet another thing I couldnt afford). Well, thats when I stirred up the gravel really good, with all that bacteria in their. Similar to another story I read earlier in this thread :-) Well thats when the smell came, and then I started getting the cords wet, at that point getting concerned about electrifying myself. Then the next day, leaving all teh equipment off in fear of killing myself, I call my friend over to help, well, by the time he got to my house, I think I did the humane thing and gave what ever lived to pet land discounts. I think out of the like 5 fish he gave me, and the 3 or 4 I added, a tiger barb lived.

[lougotzz]

Originally posted by bobbyjeb
The tank had two large jack dempsys when i got in the shower. When I got out I noticed they were gone I looked on the floor... behind the tank...My five y/o told me they were fighting! He had put them in time out. In his room, on the pillow. Blanket fuzz, blond hair, dog hair, and cheerios were stuck to them. I dropped them in the tank and watched them swim on thier side for a while. Tuff buggers. And very "loving". They fought four more years after that.
Not really a crash...but funny story

He put them in time out ROFL

[Teelabrown]

Dumb Kitties
So this one is not a tank fail, but more a cat fail.

So I had this 10 gal fresh water with this nifty little red-finned shark/catfish thing. One day I didn't see him. He had jumped out of the tank before and I assumed he had again and I owned three cats at the time. Simple math right?

Flopping Fish + 3 Cats = No More Fish

Ohhhh, nooooo... About two weeks later my room starts to reek something FIERCE. The little bugger had managed to wedge himself under my laundry pile on the other side of the room, about 10 feet away.

Serv: Knight in Shining Armor

So he's walking by the tank the other day and looks behind it and thinks "hey, we don't have a clownfish shaped cat toy..." He grabs the little guy and thinks he's gone. He throws him into a bowl of tank water and sees one little fin flip. He cleans him off and the little guy (Named Richard Dreyfus btw) starts to swim again. He's got a buddy in the tank (Hercules) so after a bit Serv reintroduces Richard Dryfus back in. He's a bit wobbly, but doing alright until every single member of the clean up crew started making their way towards him!! He had to stand there with a rigid air hose for over an hour physically BEATING things off this poor fish. Today he seems happy and healthy, if not a bit weary of the surface.

[theyoda55]

I bought two moorish idols that were eating DRY FOOD for a reletively cheap price. It was a risk, i knew it, but i had just recovered from a bout of GHA and felt ambitious (and with idols that were eating readily, i felt like fate was on my side). Their streamers had started to grow back after transportation damage within days. Later in the week, ich. I used garlic and Kick-ich, and the ich died down while some weird disease arouse. Dead Idols, dead other fish (not all), and the GHA was back in force.

My tank has recovered since then.

[mullinsd2]

wow.... I really, really hope I never have to deal with ANY of this!! you guys are dedicated lol. I really think if I had a tank explode into my room, soaking everything, I would just cut my losses there and give it up.

[theyoda55]

Originally posted by mullinsd2
wow.... I really, really hope I never have to deal with ANY of this!! you guys are dedicated lol. I really think if I had a tank explode into my room, soaking everything, I would just cut my losses there and give it up.

wimp!

[Teelabrown]

Lol... Seriously. Our failures make us stronger (mostly at having stories to tell at parties).

[username in use]

Imagine if it exploded during the party. haha, now that would be both a great story and a great party. Of course that couldnt make me give up reefs or party's.

[widmer]

Anyone remember the guy here who's disgruntled girlfriend threw a beer bottle at his tank, breaking the front panel and killing everything? There was a whole thread about it with like six dozen members telling him to get her arrested

[johnike]

I fed the tank before a weekend getaway once, and left a huge brick of frozen brine shrimp on the table. Talk aboot stench when I returned!! Oh yeah, and took a long phone call with a hose filling a tank when my downstair neighbor came up and said water was coming in through his colset ceiling!

[Garage1217]

I left a pack of frozen blood worms in my 4runner last summer... OMG.... Took around 2 months, about 5 gallons of febreeze & multiple shampooing's to get the stench out.