The 10 Minute Water Change

Well it's 10 minutes of my time...

I believe that one of the most critical things about having a successful aquarium is ease of maintenance. The easier something is to do, the more you will tend to do it. Make it easy, it happens more often.

I decided to follow this adage for water changes. To make them easy I bought two 43 gallon polyethylene tanks and plumbed both into the system. I have a three way ball valve that directs the incoming flow into either one or the other tanks. Then both tanks have an overflow into the sump. So what I do is have one tank cycling through the system while the other is brewing the next batch of new salt water. When it's time to do the change I simply switch the valve. Then I pump out the now segregated tank and refill with new RO water and salt.

So really the actual water change takes about 2 seconds with the remaining 9:58 being taken up by pumping out the old water, pumping in the new and measuring the salt.

Pic below:

 

that's amazingly simple..good idea!! If only I had the room...

 

Yeah, this doesn't exactly fit in a living room Fortunately we don't use our garage for cars and my tank is in the living room which borders the garage. I'm able to plumb through the wall and take up a bunch of room in the garage.

Though my wife still isn't happy about all the equipment... "I want to put a Bowflex in there!" :

 

Iv been wanting to do a system like this. Wish I had the room too

 

bowflex?? just tell her to haul around a few buckets of salt

 

get a giant rubber band and put a $2000 price tag on it..... should work.

 

ROFLMAO isn't that the truth. :yelrotflm
Nice setup though:thumb_up:

 

I know this is old but....When you say you pump out the old, where to and how?

 

I'm glad you brought this up. I like this idea a lot (I've been working on ideas for new build). It's better than the previous idea I had and cheaper than the storm product.

Looks like this is in his garage. If his is like mine, you could just siphon it onto the ground really and it'd just run out and down the driveway... Easy cheesy

If it were me, I'd probably have little valves on the bottom of each plumbed into a Y and then down a drain (house under construction has a drain in the fishroom!). If it were in my garage, I'd just let it run down the floor and under the door and sweep evaporated salt out occasionally.

Neat idea.

 

So I'm changing this in my new set up and it will become the five minute water change . In the one pictured in this thread I had the two reservoir tanks in the garage. One was always part of the system and the other mixing new salt.

The water change routine was:

- Flip the valve from the active tank to the tank with the new water in it.
- Drop powerhead into the now inactive tank with hose going to drain in the garage.
- Pump the old salt water out of the inactive tank and down the drain.
- Drop the powerhead into my RO/DI tank and pump RO/DI into the now empty tank
- As it is filling, fill a pre-marked bucket up with new salt and dump it into the filling tank.
- Drop a circulating powerhead into the now-filled tank and let it stew until the next change.

On my new set up, since I will have a 250 gallon salt mixing tank, I won't need two tanks connected to the system. As such, I'll be plumbing in a single, roughly 100 gallon tank. When it's time for the water change I will:

- Turn off pump feeding 100 gallon water change reservoir.
- Drain the tank down the sink
- Turn on pump in salt tank and fill reservoir
- Turn reservoir feed pump back on.

On the comment about draining salt onto the garage floor and letting it drain out under the door, I wouldn't do that. I had some small salt water spills on the garage floor and just that small amount of water did quite a job on the paint in addition to pitting the concrete. Additionally, that water drains out and either into the street or into your yard. Salt water in your yard will inhibit plant growth.