Your dumbest reef related move? Here's mine....

[makana]

I dropped my diy light fixture into the tank and went in after it. The only thing that died was the bulbs. Still not sure how I escaped without being shocked.

[marie]

My dumbest move? Introducing Ich to my display after being ich free for 6 yrs

[NorthernCoral]

Moved my tank a couple of weeks ago, had most of my corals, inverts and a tomatoe clown in a bucket overnight. Put a new heater in the bucket and turned what I what I thought was the temperature dial to 79. Checked the bucket just before bed and everything seemed fine. Awoke in the morning to an awful stench and to find out that what I thought was the temp adjust dial on the heater was actually for calibration. Was too devastated too take pics...However after seeing fishytimes nightmare my problems dont seem too bad.

[Casey8]

Moving to another house, I was putting all the fish from a 250 gallon tank to a 90 gallon tank. Left the old house that night and brought the big tank with me into the new house, got it ready so I could transfer the fish back. The next morning when I got back to the old house to get the fish, they were all dead because the thermometer kept running up to 42C didn't stop. I was devastated looking at their dead bodies floating or sinking around at the bottom of the tank and I just coudn't even cry.

[asylumdown]

Went out of town for 5 days. Normally, my auto-top off container was a 2 gallon pale in the cabinet under my 90 gallon, but it could hold a max of 4 days of worth of water, so I filled my 20 gallon water change rubbermaid and put the top off pump in it. I didn't move the output of the osmolator pump though, which was clipped to the side of my sump in the cabinet. What I didn't realize was that having 10 times the normal amount of water above the pump in the rubber-maid combined with the extra height the hose gained going up and over the top of the bin was enough to start a siphon the first time the osmolator pump kicked in. It emptied about 15 gallons of top up water in to the sump on the first day we were gone, and since it was only 5 days, I didn't have anyone coming to check on the tank.

Thankfully nothing died, but it overflowed the sump, filled the cabinet with salt water, and spread out across our finished concrete floors. By the time we got home, it had mostly dried so there was a huge salted patch that had eaten through the finish of the floor. The argument that started nearly spelled the end of that tank.

[asylumdown]

oh, and probably even worse - after i set up my very first salt water tank for the very first time, I looked at one of the pieces of live rock near the sand and said "OH WOW! There's like these cool little anemones starting to grow! So awesome!!!"

The correct response should have been to have taken that rock out, locked it in a shed, then set the shed on fire.

Yesterday, went to safeway and bought a bunch of frozen stuff. Took the bag of fish food out and set it aside. Forgot to put back in. There goes $80. I'll never stock pile frozen food again.