What's the dumbest thing you've done?

[Interfire]

leave the heater on during a awater change and it shattered )

I have done that. *sizzle* *pop*

I am glad that I am not the only stupid one!! It's nice to see how much we have all learned. We should direct people to this thread if they thing we are being nasty 'know alls'.

Add another to the list...

I didn't like that old heater anyways...

 

[andyM]

1) Sucking up fry when doing water changes

2) Installing a spraybar onto my external canister and not checking where it was pointing b4 turning on. Water went straight over the top of the tank and onto the floor!!!

 

[aloaring]

removing a piece of wood from my tank without checking all holes and cracks and put the wood in the cupboard a week later found a dead yo yo loach in there.

 

[Cheese Specialist]

removing a piece of wood from my tank without checking all holes and cracks and put the wood in the cupboard a week later found a dead yo yo loach in there.

wow, that's a nasty one. Poor loachy

I nearly did something along those lines when rearranging my biggest tank. I took out a huge piece of wood and my smaller USD cat was somehow on/in it (even though I turned it round in the water and checked for him). I heard him flapping around on the plastic bag and got him back in the tank. Thankfully he was ok.

 

[canarsie11]

Great stories!

 

[Cavafish]

This might not count but I once fed a whole live earthworm to my fish and the tiger barbs attached to each end of it were in serious danger of braining themselves on the wood and rocks as they pin-wheeled around the tank

 

[kev]

When moving house I tropped a neon from about 5ft above the ground and he hit the side of the bucket standing on the floor - He bounced into the full bucket and survived

Thinking about thats like us falling out of a 6 story building onto solid concrete

 

[Paul_MTS]

leave the heater on during a awater change and it shattered )

I have done that. *sizzle* *pop*

I am glad that I am not the only stupid one!! It's nice to see how much we have all learned. We should direct people to this thread if they thing we are being nasty 'know alls'.

Add another to the list...

I didn't like that old heater anyways...

urm count me in aswell!!!.

I'd forgotten the heater was wired into one of the cable tidy things so had turned the lights on which turns the heater on aswell, i was newly filling the tank up and as soon as it hit the heater bang!!

then i did the other one when doing a water change, water level had gone just a tad below the heater coil so when i went to top it up again...pop goes the wessel...had to rush to the lfs and paid 20 quid for a 100W heaer

 

[millym]

-put neons in with kribs..............kribs enjoyed it (yumm neon snacks) neons didnt poor things.
-watched our tiny new yoyo for weeks battling the current trying to swim into the filter outlet thinking ' he'll never do it'...........well of course he did
-left the aquarium lid open .... lost a danio only to find a shrivelled corpse a few weeks later.
- left the lid open again (ooops) just after adding shrimps.........found one the next morning crispy halfway to the kitchen about 3 metres away
- ignored an unusual trickling sound coming from our tank for about an hour until i noticed a lake appearing at my feet..............aaargh the back of our four foot tank had ruptured, what followed is far to traumatic a day to go into (we live in a 1st floor flat)except we saved nearly all our fish (all 30 of them were put in a 1ft hospital tank for a couple of hours till we bought & setup a new tank ) poor hillstream loach found it all too much & died a couple of days after.

 

[FanOFish]

I can't believe I'm going to admit to this. Several weeks ago we received our large Sunday newspaper and as often the case there was a free sample of something included.

In this case it was a sponge attached to a long handle that I saw laying on the table and I thought this would work great for cleaning the sides of my 42gal. hex shaped tank.

So without thinking I picked it up and began scrubbing the front glass of my tank. Well......as soon as it hit the water I saw this blue stuff coming from it and I quickly pulled it out. Turns out it was this new product used for cleaning toilets so the blue stuff was actually some sort of cleaning product!

I quickly changed about 50% of the water and just waited to see how many of my fish were going to die.

As it turns out I only lost one fish, a fairly large angel fish that must have thought he was getting fed because instead of hiding like most the other fish he swam right into the where I scrubbed the glass.

 

[Pointy_kitty]

let me see....

~first mistake, researching through petcetera (thinking of course that the fish keepers would know a thing or two about fish)
i followed their instructions carefully and after waiting a whole week of running water , and NOT checking my water i happily overstocked my first 20 gallon tank with 20 fish
wondering why i had a "cube of death" in my room i would return each week for answers and i would be handed another fiah and told the ones before where "defective"
i then did some research on my own,
demanded they rehome all my fish and fully reemburse in fish once i was fully cycled (luckily i was convincing and they did this after i spoke with their employer)
after researching cycling i decides to research the so-called "community fish" they sold me
i had a single barb in with guppies (which were shredded) and a large angel with baby white cloud minnows, aswell as a common pleco (and several other fish)

~also, i once had a beautiful adult red tailed black shark and when i rehomed him to his own tank, i worried about the temperature, since i had just purchased the heater
i checked it all night and forgot to close the lid
i found him crispy in front of his old tank

 

[David]

Seems like the most common mistakes are breaking heaters and having fish jump out...