Im so sad

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

jcarlilesiu

Aquarium Advice Addict
Joined
Aug 1, 2005
Messages
1,020
Location
Chicago
I got a call at work from my girlfriend today to tell my all the fish in my aquarium were dead. Apparently the needle valve on my reactor got bumped and was almost straight flowing CO2 into the tnak for a couple of hours. I came home from work immediatly to find my featherfin catfish and my american-flag fish barely alive. I immediatly did several huge water changes and now i have the filter return splashing the water a good distance to outgas the excess CO2. My PH is showing straight yellow.... 6.0 or lower. My KH is at 5 so it should slowly come back up. The catfish is breathing harder now (he was almost dead) and swimming around here and there... the flag fish not looking too good but fighting.

Its a bad day. I lost

-1 mono sebea (5 inch diameter)
-4 inch clown loach
-3 inch mollie
-3 twig fish
-a platie
-4 SAEs
-2 4" bala sharks
-1 flying fox
-2 serpe tetras

like i said, im so sad :( I feel so irresponsible

edit*
scratch that the american flag fish just died too... my whole stock
 
Thank you all for the response... It just stinks, when i got the mono, he looked so pathetic at the store all alone. And since i have had him, he has grown more and more my "pet". He got excited in the morning to see me, granted i gave him food, but still....

now im researching controllers... something i obviously should have invested in before. What is the difference between the milwaukee 122 and 125?
 
So sorry for your losses, I hope the other fish make it. I also agree that you shouldn't blame yourself. Accidents do happen and that is why they are called accidents. They are not intended to happen.
 
Oh no--that really does just blow. I'm sure everyone on this list feels for you; it's not your fault. There's so much equipment involved with aquaria, especially one using CO2, that one little "dink" and it's disaster if you're not there staring at the tank. And you do have to work to buy fish food.

A shame, but just a crappy accident-I'm sorry.
 
My condolenses..

If purchasing a controller will make you feel more secure and you feel like its a wise investment then by all means do so, but I could sit hear and list off way too many things that could happen by acedent that would cause a similar reaction, not everything can be counteracted with equipment investment and in fact controllers can and do become a new part of your mainance routine with calibration; it has at least three parts to it that could potentialy malfuntion your needle vavle has one. If you know a little bit about stats your long term (and I mean very long) equipment stabilty is with the needle valve.

btw.. IIRC the lower model only does CO2 and the higher model does ORP as well (for O3 injection controll in old sterilized style SW fish tanks, or to boost skimulate production in high bioload SW tanks, injected into the skimmer)
 
Back
Top Bottom