To Change or Not to Change water?

Just a interesting article I read, Thought Id share.


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i have a 46gal bowfront with about 500 zoas 70 mushrooms, GSPs, a few hitchiker sponges, orchid dotty, clown, sauron and pistol shrimp, and never done a water change, my protien skimmer was broke and not replaced for about a year, i went 18 months without feeding- ANYTHING. Yes i have a bit of a problem with nuisence algaes like film and GHA, but all my CuC have passed over the last 5 years except a couple nasaurius snails and my one armed brittle. Heck my urchin died a month ago and i didn't want to break up Shroom Town so i left it in there (also probably why i have a GHA problem right now). Point is, i've never fully understood water changes either. Sure, my corals aren't finicky or hard to support corals, but from what I've read with some cheato and a couple of additive anyone should be fine.... excepting an overloaded system. Also, I have no test kits, I'm getting around to it this decade so I cant tell you my water parameters.

 

wow! not sure how you pull that off but where i live up here in canada the water evaporates so fast i am constantly adding water. I weekly do a waterchange, nothing huge just 5% but i couldn't imagine controlling my ammonia and nitrate levels without testing??? i suppose after doing it for awhile you get a sense of where its at but still to say you never do a waterchange is wild! wish i could hammer out a system that would allow for that...I find if i let it go for more than a week i'm usually still ok as far as parameters go but the first thing i notice spike everytime is ammonia...the fish eat weather or not you feed them and also make wastes weather or not your feeding. how could your water stay good enough for that period if time?

 

if your tank is cycled you should never see ammonia present.
i havent used my ammonia kit in 9 months.

 

Yea my friends had his tank running for atleast 5 years, never did a water change, doesnt even use tests, never had anything die, yea he gets algae blooms sometime but even then they just run their course and go away. And he has a pretty nice looking tank.

 

in a balanced system the fish eat the pods the pods eat the poop and I AM topping off with RO. Hell all that time I didn't feed i had a healthy mandrin too.

 

It's not the water its the salt. Adding water because of evaporation does not replenish the trace elements that are vital to a reef tank.

People use additives to compensate for not doing salt changes, but the amount of money you spend on salt is lower than if you bought all the trace elements as additives.

I have a 215 gallon reef, and I do a salt change of 10% every 2 weeks. I see the next day the results. Everything looks better.

 

^^^ agreed. i dont do them so often because i dont have an RO maker or else i would.

 

if you have a low enough bio load with no food added in, and a well established fuge or denitrator and have an established method of dosing for coral needs, wc may not be necessary. people do wc to A: replenish lost nutrients and B: remove bio that filters cant keep up with (over-stocked tank). in a perfectly balanced tank where there is no unused waste one can argue in favor of the 'no wc model'. but most ppl (self included) want fish. simple. we would never see the fish we all keep in our aquariums live in the proximity that they do with one another in the ocean and to top it off its a closed system that is typically overfed-- putting pressure on mechanical filters but thats what many want. if you have a big enough fuge to support your livestock you can get away with it but we cant all have a 1000g fuge in our cabinet.
ppl who do large regular water changes typically have a nitrate issue (overstocked) and fight to keep it under control. ppl who do small regular wc do so for nutrients and to help filter out a little.
i would love to one day create a mechanical-free system that only houses corals, but not having anything in there swimming around is something im not use to.
jmo.

 

i do 5% water change on both of my tanks every week. it helps to have alot of empty 5g kentwood bottles.