High Tide Aquatics

For those interested in buying G2 Red Sea tanks

I'm beating a dead horse, but in case any new reefers see this:

There are no official statistics on tank failure rates by manufacturers. Anecdotally, however, I'd say that at least 9 of every 10 tank failure posts I see on social media are from Red Sea. It's prevalent enough that I'm actually more surprised when it's *not* a Red Sea tank.

Red Sea's customer service is also atrocious. When my Red Sea Reefer 250 tank seam suddenly delaminated (didn't fail, thankfully, but only a matter of time until it did), Red Sea's response was paraphrased, "Damn, that sucks." Their suggestion was to sell me another Reefer 250 at a discount; which, when combined with the shipping and tax, was roughly the price of retail. When I asked about a discount on a Reefer 250 Gen 2 (because they had updates targeted towards this issue), they refused and basically said, "Take it or leave it."

I am one voice. Take everything, everyone says with a grain of salt (myself included). But I strongly advocate staying away from Red Sea.
 
I had a Red Sea 525 Gen 1 that was going to fail. I could see bubbles along the bottom seam, although it never fully leaked. They advised me to drain it immediately. I sent Red Sea images and all documents they requested. After a lot of back and forth and them being hard to reach, they offered me a $900 credit on the same size system or larger, could not choose a smaller system. This credit also expired in 3 months from that email… That system costs $3600 new. Asking me to scramble 3k in such a short amount of time for something that was on them is crazy. At the time I was a big Red Sea fan. I had another Red Sea Max E 170 I also purchased new, and a Reefer 425 that I picked up second hand on here. After that whole thing, I’ll never do Red Sea again. It wasn’t even just the seam issue, I get it mistakes happen. It was the fact that their customer service was so unhelpful even after providing them everything they asked for. I understand it’s a business and the whole warranty thing but crazy that by just a few months out of it they basically told me I was screwed. The representative I got was Amanda. I swear it’s like she gets paid to not help you lol
 
Its sad how clean and popular their tanks are, but they wont fix their product or right the situation. I feel like they could fix this issue if they re engineered the product instead of doing a band aid fix with the seals
 
When I was window shopping for a used tank, I saw a lot of used RS tanks, but I knew it wasnt worth the risk. The tank I got was an Oceanic, seals were a bit chipped away, but it hadnt been dry for very long, maybe a week, so I felt comfortable with it. Didnt feel like re doing all of the seals, so I just put extra silicone over the existing seals, doesnt look great but gives me some peace of mind
 
derek_SR said:
I also experienced a Red Sea tank leak and have had the pleasure of interacting with their atrocious customer service.

I have not spent a cent on any RS products since.
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I bought their Reef Foundations alkalinity, since it had always worked well, and AB+.

I started making Randy Holmes-Farley's alk solution, and have moved to Reef Nutrition. Much like you said, I refuse to give them a cent of my money ever again.
 
I too am a member of this unfortunate club. I agree with what everyone else has said. I hope that eventually enough word will get around that they end up closing up shop. They have not fixed the problem. They have not addressed the problem publicly, and they continue to sell these tanks. The only option left is for them to go out of business. I hope that happens, but who knows.
 
SupraSaltyReefer said:
I personally have never had a problem with Red Sea. My brand new Reefer 250 G1 from 2018 is still running strong from the guy I sold it to. I’ve also owned a second hand 170 and XL525 G1 with no issues for a year until I downsized. I’ve been lucky. I do think Red Sea has a design issue with letting their front panel hang off the stand and not enough vertical support for the middle of the tank which causes the seam failure. I also heard Red Sea sells more tanks than all the other major brands combined, maybe that’s why we hear more about them failing. Kinda like how people only write Yelp reviews if they had a bad experience. Would be curious to see the failure rate compared to sales rate. I will say their Red Sea FB group is very heavily moderated to keep the failures under wraps.

In regards to their ReefMat, ReefDose and ReefWaves I love them, they are solid equipment. Haven’t had any issues with them. Also, their S-1000 series tanks look spectacular from the three that I’ve seen in person.
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Schill!

But seriously, maybe their total revenue (with equipment, salt, etc) dwarfs most tank manufacturers but I don’t buy the argument that the only reason you hear about the failures is that they just make so many tanks. Our hobby is tiny compared to most, and the number of anecdotes we hear about their failures (including a ton of our very own members) is enough to stay away.

And besides, even if that WAS the reason - there’s still no excuse for the absolutely criminal customer support, IMO.
 
derek_SR said:
Schill!

But seriously, maybe their total revenue (with equipment, salt, etc) dwarfs most tank manufacturers but I don’t buy the argument that the only reason you hear about the failures is that they just make so many tanks. Our hobby is tiny compared to most, and the number of anecdotes we hear about their failures (including a ton of our very own members) is enough to stay away.

And besides, even if that WAS the reason - there’s still no excuse for the absolutely criminal customer support, IMO.
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Looking in only our own club, I admit I'm not sure if I've seen another tank brand fail here.

@SupraSaltyReefer I don't think the 'sales rate to failure rate' argument holds water. Being very generous, 9 of every 10 tanks I see fail online are Red Sea. The plural of anecdote is not data, but this seems to be in line with most others' experiences. Taking this assumption at face value, assuming that Red Sea does not have a higher failure rate than other brands requires some combination of the following to be true:

1. That people are under-reporting failures from other brands online (which I highly doubt, because tank failures are A Big Effing Deal), and/or

2. That, given 1 "other" tank fails for every 9 Red Sea tanks, Red Sea is outselling/installing literally every other tank brand combined 9 times over

It's also important to note that the above is the bare minimum for Red Sea to simply be "normalized" with failure rates on other aquarium brands. Coupled this with the fact they've already had issues with poor tank support in the past (see the provision of the extra reinforcement bracket some years ago). Add on the fact that two of the primary value propositions they listed for the G2 tanks in their initial marketing were "armored seams" and "reinforced seams." This last point is salient to me, as I work in marketing, and this is *exactly* how I would have tried to smooth over customer concerns about seam failures while not admitting there was a problem.

Don't get me wrong - I'm really happy for you that you haven't had any issues with your Red Sea aquariums, and I hope you continue to not have problems. But I think this is very much a "Red Sea" problem, not a "distorted data" problem, especially given how horrendous the customer support is.
 
Part of the issue with reporting is that there is no standardized way of reporting failure. I equate it to cars - the more of a car you see on the road the more likely we are to see them fail but do we hear about Honda accords littering the road or ppl reporting about their expensive car with the engine seizing up - think Range Rover. I complain about a product the more I pay for it and we know of many high end products with build issues but ppl keep buying them.

I’ve had one failure that was well-documented here and it wasn’t a Red Sea. I have a RS250 that I got 2nd hand from Caroline a few years back and a RS850 G2 (warranty replacement of a G1). The stand on the 250 is suspect - particle board - but I haven’t had spills around it so it looks great except for some minor rusting around the hinges. The G2 850 looks bullet-proof from top to bottom.
 
Poor customer service doesn’t help their cause. I say they have a bigger issue with that. For as expensive as the item is a 1-3 yr warranty is piss poor.
 
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