Are Water Changes Actually Necessary?
- Thread starter kazvorpal
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I meant like for food for bigger fish. If u never put anything in accept water for toping off tank then what needs to come out? it would be a mini lake.
I don't want to get too involved in this thread but I will say this.
Lakes are constantly losing/regaining water. But lakes do not just lose water through evaporation. Most of the time lakes lose water through ways that also allows various minerals and other things to be lost as well such as through a small stream or by water seeping into ground water taking minerals and other things with it.
I know of only two instances (other than the oceans) where water is only lost by evaporation. And those are the Great Salt Lake and also the Dead Sea (not exactly a lake but same Idea) neither of the bodies of water are capable of supporting aquatic life.
Exactly what I was thinking. No offense to the OP but seems like everything he says he portrays as "fact" while everyone elses statements are just unfounded observations or opinions.
but you are forgetting the single biggest factor in mother nature for water quality: literally millions and millions of gallons of water to dilute all the hormones, nutrients etc.
our fish live in a little glass box by comparison.
I do regular large water changes on all my tanks. I don't have a specific day that I do each tank, so there's some flexibility in my schedule. Tank 1......moderately planted, 72G with 11 full grown discus, a few cories, a handful of tetras, a few amano shrimp, it's very low light so fast growing plants die, HOB filtration which has no problem processing all the ammonia these fish produce. Regular river gravel substrate, very, very deep. Most often I have 10-12 ppm nitrate coming out of the tap. They are not overfed, their main daily meal is worms, there is no accumulation of decaying food in the substrate. And after an hour you'd be lucky to find a worm in that tank that had beed missed. Over a period of 8-9 days my nitrate level in that tank is at least 40ppm. So to reduce nitrate levels, I do a water change and do some gravel vaccing in the open areas. The thickets that are planted around the driftwood are left undisturbed. A lot of the discus solid waste finds its way to the plant thickets and supplies nutrients for the plants. I do not add plant food. If I had fewer discus in that tank I would change the water less often. But I choose to have more discus so it is hard to keep the nitrate level down. Could I stretch the water changing routine out longer? Sure. I know that nitrate at even 80ppm isn't going to cause the discus to keel over. If I have a busy schedule where I know I'm going to be hard pressed to do a water change, I cut down on the feedings during that time thinking that less food will result in less fish waste than normal.
My 75G heavily planted tank with standard HOB filtration, river bottom gravel, contains somewhere around 6 full grown bristlenose breeding plecos and 6 subadult bristlenose plecos along with some ember tetras, a dozen cories, some cherry and amano shrimp. It is very hard to control the amount of food in this tank given the number of bottomfeeders, trying to balance keeping the adults in breeding condition and the providing the subadults the food they need to continue to grow well. There is a much higher accumulation of uneaten food settling into the gravel with bottomfeeders. There needs to be enough food so that they all have access to it. I still feed that tank twice a day because of the young ones growing. In this tank the nitrate is not the issue it is the accumulation of uneaten food trapped in the gravel. I could avoid it by cutting down on the food. I realize the fish do not have access to this quantity of food in the wild....but they can constantly swim to another area where there is more biofilm to consume, more algae to eat, natural food that their river supplies that my enclosed tank cannot. They always all come out to the front of the tank when I do add food. They have no way of getting down to the trapped food so water changes with gravel vacs take care of the uneaten trapped food. If I was home all day instead of out of the house for 11 hours at a time, I could drop less food in more frequently, in fact that is what I do on weekends. I only gravel vac in the front and along the two sides of the tank to get any leftover food up. The rest of the substrate remains untouched, the plants are so thick you couldn't get to it anyway.
My growout tanks for the pleco fry and the cory fry get filthy from the frequent feedings necessary to keep them growing nicely. In their natural habitat they would not have the abundance of food in any one spot, but they do have the abiltiy to keep moving over the river bed to find more. In the tanks they are limited to the 4 small sides of the tank. Feeding 75+ pleco fry blanched zucchini in large enough quantities so that a lot of them can even get onto a piece of zucchini creates a lot of slimey film in the tank and the filters. They only way to get rid of it is to do a water change and clean the filter. After a week of feeding blanched zucchini in an 84F tank.....let me tell you, those filters aren't a pretty sight.
I have a 55G moderately planted tank with only a trio of adult breeding bristlenose, some ember tetras, otos, cories and cherry shrimp. The water and substrate does not get messy quite so fast in this tank because there's no juvenile fish to feed and having only 3 plecos requires many less chunks of zucchini per week.
So except for my discus tank with the higher nitrate levels, I am doing routine water changes to clean up the mess made by keeping the "barnyard bottomdweller pigs" of the freshwater tropical fish world. Less fish requiring less food = less work for me, I know that. But I'm raising some awesome fish that are in very limited supply worldwide, some are not found in the wild today, and am able to provide healthy specimans so that other hobbyists can enjoy them as well. And I'll be suffering pleco and cory breeding burnout in another year!
My 75G heavily planted tank with standard HOB filtration, river bottom gravel, contains somewhere around 6 full grown bristlenose breeding plecos and 6 subadult bristlenose plecos along with some ember tetras, a dozen cories, some cherry and amano shrimp. It is very hard to control the amount of food in this tank given the number of bottomfeeders, trying to balance keeping the adults in breeding condition and the providing the subadults the food they need to continue to grow well. There is a much higher accumulation of uneaten food settling into the gravel with bottomfeeders. There needs to be enough food so that they all have access to it. I still feed that tank twice a day because of the young ones growing. In this tank the nitrate is not the issue it is the accumulation of uneaten food trapped in the gravel. I could avoid it by cutting down on the food. I realize the fish do not have access to this quantity of food in the wild....but they can constantly swim to another area where there is more biofilm to consume, more algae to eat, natural food that their river supplies that my enclosed tank cannot. They always all come out to the front of the tank when I do add food. They have no way of getting down to the trapped food so water changes with gravel vacs take care of the uneaten trapped food. If I was home all day instead of out of the house for 11 hours at a time, I could drop less food in more frequently, in fact that is what I do on weekends. I only gravel vac in the front and along the two sides of the tank to get any leftover food up. The rest of the substrate remains untouched, the plants are so thick you couldn't get to it anyway.
My growout tanks for the pleco fry and the cory fry get filthy from the frequent feedings necessary to keep them growing nicely. In their natural habitat they would not have the abundance of food in any one spot, but they do have the abiltiy to keep moving over the river bed to find more. In the tanks they are limited to the 4 small sides of the tank. Feeding 75+ pleco fry blanched zucchini in large enough quantities so that a lot of them can even get onto a piece of zucchini creates a lot of slimey film in the tank and the filters. They only way to get rid of it is to do a water change and clean the filter. After a week of feeding blanched zucchini in an 84F tank.....let me tell you, those filters aren't a pretty sight.
I have a 55G moderately planted tank with only a trio of adult breeding bristlenose, some ember tetras, otos, cories and cherry shrimp. The water and substrate does not get messy quite so fast in this tank because there's no juvenile fish to feed and having only 3 plecos requires many less chunks of zucchini per week.
So except for my discus tank with the higher nitrate levels, I am doing routine water changes to clean up the mess made by keeping the "barnyard bottomdweller pigs" of the freshwater tropical fish world. Less fish requiring less food = less work for me, I know that. But I'm raising some awesome fish that are in very limited supply worldwide, some are not found in the wild today, and am able to provide healthy specimans so that other hobbyists can enjoy them as well. And I'll be suffering pleco and cory breeding burnout in another year!
first of all, what you say I am "assuming to be true" has been proven to be true by millions of hobbyists over the last 60 years. thats what we have learned about what conditions fish do well in. You can try and keep wild discus in water with 100+ mg/L nitrates and say its 'new tank syndrome' - but your fish are not going to live. thats the point.
its not about what I prefer. its about what conditions the fish thrive in. what I want them to thrive in doesn't matter. they don't care what I say.
who ever said the fish were thriving in dirty water? they were living. not thriving. they were living until the nitrates got high enough or the pH low enough to cause problems. thats it.
in the case I mentioned, yes a large water change would in fact be bad - the pH would jump too quickly.
but not a smaller one or several smaller ones done over time to correct the problem.
my point that you missed was that the problem never would have happened in the first place had water changes been done properly to begin with
Ahhh. Let me get in on this.
First off, you cant keep adding and adding to an aquarium and never take away. By simply feeding your fish you are adding to the build up of TDS in your water. You state that TDS only involves what makes the water "hard" when in reality, TDS can mean anything from carbonates to heavy metals. Also, water can be stripped of all TDS by plants and fish and will not be replenished until a water change has been done. One example would be the difference between RO water and tap water. Neither is even close to the other. If you want to get into what makes up tap water and everything that is in it look up a local water report from your water company.
You have some information wrong too about using plants to reduce nitrates. Although they are a great sponge for removing them, they also require lots of other nutrients that an aquarium alone cannot provide. You cannot rightfully use a planted tank as an example in the way you use them because it simply doesnt work that way. Anybody who has a fully planted tank and doses fertilizers to keep the plants healthy and uptaking nitrates typically does at least a 50% water change per week. Why? Because there is a build up of excess nutrients that needs to bottom out so it doesnt become deadly to our critters.
It has also been proven that once the ph drops to a certain level, ammonia can become very toxic to fish and inverts. All it would take in an aquarium that doesnt receive proper replenishment is one dead fish to pollute the whole system with ammonia and it will kill everything.
In the end, if you want a breakdown of TDS and where it goes in my aquarium I am more than willing to show you my local water quality report and you can explain where my thinking is flawed.
First off, you cant keep adding and adding to an aquarium and never take away. By simply feeding your fish you are adding to the build up of TDS in your water. You state that TDS only involves what makes the water "hard" when in reality, TDS can mean anything from carbonates to heavy metals. Also, water can be stripped of all TDS by plants and fish and will not be replenished until a water change has been done. One example would be the difference between RO water and tap water. Neither is even close to the other. If you want to get into what makes up tap water and everything that is in it look up a local water report from your water company.
You have some information wrong too about using plants to reduce nitrates. Although they are a great sponge for removing them, they also require lots of other nutrients that an aquarium alone cannot provide. You cannot rightfully use a planted tank as an example in the way you use them because it simply doesnt work that way. Anybody who has a fully planted tank and doses fertilizers to keep the plants healthy and uptaking nitrates typically does at least a 50% water change per week. Why? Because there is a build up of excess nutrients that needs to bottom out so it doesnt become deadly to our critters.
It has also been proven that once the ph drops to a certain level, ammonia can become very toxic to fish and inverts. All it would take in an aquarium that doesnt receive proper replenishment is one dead fish to pollute the whole system with ammonia and it will kill everything.
In the end, if you want a breakdown of TDS and where it goes in my aquarium I am more than willing to show you my local water quality report and you can explain where my thinking is flawed.
If you want to know my opinion, just check my sig. All of my research indicates that water changes are one of the best means to help an aquarist maintain a healthy aquarium.
MOA
P>S>, Not a big fan of activated carbon at all. I used to sell fish and people who used activated carbon brought in a lot of money for me, but they had all the problems everyone else had (worse, actually).
MOA
P>S>, Not a big fan of activated carbon at all. I used to sell fish and people who used activated carbon brought in a lot of money for me, but they had all the problems everyone else had (worse, actually).
They support plenty of life, just not a lot of variety. I was pointing out that if u have a stable ecosystem in ur tank the u may never need to do a water change. That means breeding pops of feeders, producers (plants/plankton/stuff like that) as well as predators to keep there pops down. Just tying to think outside the box.
Now im on the sidelines so plz dont make me talk again lol."You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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