Top Ten Reasons Why Reefkeepers Never Sleep or Top Ten Reasons Why Sleepers Never Reef...

10) I can never sleep because my wife is always afraid she hears the tank leaking and makes me get up and check on it - all just because it leaked that one time!
chem1586 of Fresno, CA

9) Because I stay up all night waiting for the search function to work on Reef Central, all because I'm too cheap to pay $24 a year for premium membership.
shyland83 of Oakdale, Long Island

8) Because every strange noise I hear while lying in bed HAS to be coming from my aquarium!
TRITON1 of Unknown, Whereabouts

7) Just before you fall asleep you think you hear a sound coming from downstairs in the opposite end of the house where your tank is. After you've run down stairs to ensure there is nothing wrong, you notice that your protein skimmer isn't working quite as well as usual. And wouldn't that powerhead provide better circulation over there? How is my calcium reactor working? Three hours later, your wife startles you while you're totally oblivious to the time and everything else, wondering when you're going to come to bed!
swimboy123 of Jacksonville, NC

6) If I slept, I might not catch it when the overflow from my refugium gets backed up, thus kicking in my float switch in my sump and causing my top-off unit to dump huge amounts of limewater in my tank, crashing everything while flooding my fish room at the same time and filling up my air ducts with saltwater. Thankfully, my newborn twin girls help out by screaming every 15 minutes through the night to keep me from letting that happen. I must be training them well.
brandonberry of Rocky Mount, NC

5) Reefkeepers can't sleep because they feel compelled to get as much return on their investment as possible, so they're either working on their tank or looking at it.
prop-frags of Richmond, VA

4) Ask anyone I know... I can sleep anywhere, anytime and at the drop of a dime. When I am at home, 'asleep' for the night, I am the deepest of the heaviest sleepers. I have slept through tornado siren warnings, large earth tremors and people ringing the door bell off... everything EXCEPT: I am finely tuned to the unique sound nuances my 180-gallon reef generates in my living room, which can be heard from my bedroom. I have burst out of the dead of sleep when my main pump failed because I heard the overflow gurgling wrong. I have also done this repeatedly when I hear a powerhead grinding and even when I heard water dripping onto my hard marble floor when a powerhead's suction cup failed and was pointing a little upwards and splashing water over the tank's edge.
bergzy of The OC, Baby!!!

3) I never get any sleep because I live in a condo with an insomniac upstairs that is always flushing the toilet. Since the sewer pipe runs down my bedroom wall, every time the toilet flushes, I jump out of bed thinking my 210-gallon tank has just exploded!
cmsurfr22 of NJ

2) Because my downstairs neighbor is a litigation attorney, and I use a hang-on-tank siphon overflow to move water into my refugium.
natejonesis of Chicago, IL

1) My wife and I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of silence. No power! Still half asleep, it suddenly occured to me that I had not put the loc-line on my pump outlets 3" below the water surface. I sprang out of bed to find my 10-gallon sump overflowing, dumping gallons of water onto my second story floor! I spent the next hour getting water off the floor and then had to stay awake until the power came back on so I could open the ball valve on the pump.
eckrynock of Indianapolis

Reefkeeping's next Top Ten for June: Top Ten Reasons Why Fish Food Should Be Labeled Clearly... Our thanks go out to Melev for suggesting the next topic!

Honorable mention goes out to the following members for submitting 10 Top Ten reasons: prop-frags. Thanks, prop-frags!

If you have questions, would like to suggest a future Top Ten topic or place an entry, visit our online forum or hit the button below: