What mistakes did you make when you started out?

[ronin_man]

Haha this is the funniest mistake made by many. Wait until the hit the 2' mark and start hitting the glass hard then your going to think "What did I really get myself into". Hopefully the tank doesn't bust or we might hear from you again.

I had one about 5 or 6 years ago at about 20" and i wondered the same thing.... hah eventually got rid of it cause i could not handle it in my 150g

 

[instantthc]

i've had 8 rbp in a 150 they were 5-6". they all got clout 6 months later. they pretty much all died within 2 weeks. the last one was killed by my sisters retarded boyfriend putting in a puffer fish.

 

[koop171]

I unpluged my FX5 to change the foam.... Well I didn't dry my hands when I plugged it back in did NOT feel good.

 

[Cichlidgirl91]

The biggest mistake I made was starting off with tetras (serpae, neon, black neon) and a 10g tank. The Serpae tetras tore into everybody and I ended up with only one black neon that survived my first 3 years of fish-keeping. I've never really liked tetras since then, but I still love fish-keeping!

 

[Onion01]

worst mistake I ever did was signing up on WW before MFK

 

[famous323]

worst thing that happened to me was not correctly doing weekly water changes i would just top it off when the water gets low and about 3 months later i changed the whole water out and all my fishes died but that was when i was 15 things are looking better now a days!

 

[uncwnells]

I filled my entire wet dry up with water when I first set it up, ruined the laminate flooring in my apt! I could probably go on for days!

 

[Pyramid_Party]

Not changing water properly, never using test kits, overfeeding, putting incompatible fish together, thats all I can think of right now.

 

[pacu mom]

I have done everything right second time around in the hobby and im already reaping the rewards of a great looking lil tank.

Which got me thinking back to when i was 18 and gave the hobby a try i had no paitence no knowledge and no pc to look things up at the time .I bought the wrong equipment (filter was too small) i put loads of fish in all at once,and probably my worst mistake was cleaning the entire tank out!

I used to get the fish out into a bucket of aqaurium water empty the entire aqaurium and clean everything under tap water set it all back up with fresh water and then wondered why my tank water went milky white all the time fish died and algea thrived.

Which is why i gave up for all this time.

So what mistakes did you guys make if any when starting out in this hobby?

I came home to the odd sound of water running in our living room. I discovered a 55 gallon tank chock full with eight very large fish. My husband found a very dirty tank filled to the max with two 15" pacu, four oscars at least 8" each, and two pleco over 12" at a moving away yard sale. He paid $85 for his mother of all yard sales find. He came home to get our largest pots. He placed each fish in its own pot for the ride home. One pacu jumped out of his pot which was sitting on the tailgate of hubby's '67 Chevy pickup. He groveled in the driveway gravel until he was picked up, dusted off and placed back in his pot. Once home, hubby proceeded to thoroughly scrub the dirty tank, gravel and filters in hot water until everything was "clean". The tank was filled with chlorinated water, and the fish were placed back in their now clean home. My fishkeeping knowledge extended to the fact that our water needed to be dechlorinated. We got online to figure out which fish were the pacu and which were the oscars. With two 15" pacu trying to turn around in a 12" wide tank, we came to the conclusion that we had an overcrowding problem. We solved our overcrowding problem by picking up a second 55 gallon tank at WalMart. We filled the new tank up with dechlorinated water, plugged in the two new HOB filters (the new filters were "cycling" the water, weren't they?), and fought and wrestled the two pacu into their new home. By the next morning the water was a little cloudy. The pacu were miserable and would not eat. Every day the water got more cloudy even with water changes. By the fourth day, Thanksgiving, the water was so cloudy we couldn't see through the tank. We changed out the equivalent of 100+ gallons, 15 gallons at a time until the water was crystal clear. When we came back from Thanksgiving dinner some eight hours later, the house was filled with a terrible, horrific stench that was coming from the new tank. It was obvious that the pacu were going to die. We moved them back to their old home with the other six fish. They did not fight us. I had to use bleach to get the terrible stink off my hands. Because the poor pacu thoroughly innoculated the old tank with that terrible bacterial bloom from the new tank, we had to do major, massive (100%) water changes everyday--15 gallons at a time until the stench finally went away.

I'm glad that I found different fish forums and learned about the nitrogen cycle, fishless cycling, water testing and the importance of maintaining good water parameters. Yeah, I've got stories of trying to do the supper dishes and discovering we had no hot water because the holding tank in our equipment room had been overflowing for six hours--and yes, our wood floors will have to be refinished if we ever want to sell our house because we weren't paying attention when refilling our tank....but that's nothing compared to the mistakes we made as ignorant newbies.

I'll be checking out the DIY section when it comes time to do a major build. In the meantime, I've managed to change out about 375 gallons doing back to back water changes while I've been on this forum...and managed to do it without overflowing anything! The four fish that didn't succumb to HITH, stunting and the horrible conditions they spent most of their lives in, are doing well.

 

[Liam]

put wet decor ontop of my light...

wet decor + light (vents on the light) = electricity problems... took me a while to workout what turned off my power, took me longer to work out how to get the water out of the light (if only I wasn't so ignorant, an air compressor would have been way more faster then evaporation in the sun)