Are bad times normal?

[apexkeeper]

My tank has been up and running for over 6 months now and at fist I'll admit everything was a major pain. It took me a while to learn and figure out how to keep my water parameters in check and I made plenty of mistakes.

For the past 2 months or so its been a piece of cake. Everything running like clockwork and I've been so excited that now I can enjoy my tank instead of constantly fiddling with it. Then this week I have no idea what happened, seems like everything just went to hell. First my Alk started dropping even with my kalk drip the same, no new coral, no changes whatsoever to the tank. It just randomly started eating up more alkalinity than kalkwasser can supply. Then my skimmer decided it no longer wants to work properly and randomly overflowed 3 times. Luckily my tank has a very light bio load so not too much crap flooded into my tank. Then yay suprise, out of no where I find a great big aiptasia living in the most hard to reach out of the way place in the tank. And Finally to top it all off I notice my temperature controller isn't shutting off, and I found that 1 of my 2 heaters is dead.

How often do you guys go through this kind of stuff... :angryfire:

 

[zn00py]

Things like that happens sometimes.Sometimes live stock just die without you knowing the cause.

 

[whosurcaddie]

What your talking about isn't bad times. Bad times is having a reef like this

crash witch actually happened.

Bad times is losing a fish that you've had for 10 years or even longer.

This is bad times.

What your going through now I would call working out the kinks.

I guess what I'm saying is prepare for the worst expect the best and don't sweat the small stuff.:thumbsup:

 

[Nina51]

was/is that your tank?? omg!!

i am SO gonna order those battery powered pumps that i've been thinking about!!!

 

[Sk8r]

IF your alk dropped while using kalk, what was your mg reading? sb abt 1300.

There's a sticky called SETTING UP. Inside is a file called Dirt-simple Chemistry talking about the relationship of mg to alk.

 

[whosurcaddie]

was/is that your tank?? omg!!

i am SO gonna order those battery powered pumps that i've been thinking about!!!

No neither of those were my tanks. If it had been I would seriously consider giving up the hobby. No I remember the first tank story the owners sump had an overflow and he didn't have ro/di water ready (he needed about 50 gallons) so he conditioned tap water with prime and it killed everything. I remember him saying it would have taken a few hours to make the correct water and everything would have been fine but he rushed it and it turned out to be one of the worst mistakes of his life.

The second tank if they had a generator everything would have been fine.