Maintenance Pet Peeves

[Pescador]

I'm sure everyone has a maintenance chore that bugs them, or the thing that keeps your reef from being trouble free.

I'll start with:
cleaning calcified Tunze pumps in Streamrocks (my number one PP)
cleaning the air intakes on my skimmers
refilling a calcium reactor (Thanks Chin Lee for reminding me of this one)

[michika]

- Cleaning pumps

[christyf5]

cleaning my barebottomed tank (yay fish poo and crusty algae!)

cleaning my skimmer (apparently you're supposed to clean the whole thing every once in awhile to "achieve peak performance". my arm is too fat to reach all the way in and then I get scratched up by those little fan worm tubes they're sharp!).

cleaning my tunze powerheads (ok would they just stop growing algae already?? between the algae and all the valonia they suck up

hmm, I'm starting to think its any cleaning that has to do with my tank. Oh wait, I don't mind washing the filter sock, thats pretty easy

[exee]

my pet peeves would have to be trying the move a rock to a better spot only to have my clown fishes start attacking my hands or accidentally knocking over a frag or rock while cleaning and then having a hard time getting it out of the small hole which it fell into...

[Der_Iron_Chef]

Windexing.

[niloc16]

trying to syphon hair algae at the bottom of the tank that you cannot even touch because it is so bloody deep. i just finished and i get so PO'd by this crap and not being able to reach it to syphon it out. sorry i'm a little frustrated right now.

[michika]

Oh another one; accidental frags that result from trying to clean all the coraline and algae off your glass.

[Snappy]

For me it's cleaning the skimmer and especially the air inlet. Oh I also dislike having to scrape the coraline algae off my acrylic tank(refugium) with a plastic card.

[Moogled]

...My clowns are aggro when I venture near their brain coral to vac some detritus, haha.

...I don't vac detritus in that area anymore. :|

[Reefer Rob]

Scraping the back and sides is absolutely the worst chore.

LOL, cleaning out my skimmer cup is somewhere between making me want to vomit, and the satisfaction of getting that crud out of my aquarium.