The ONLY Time I have EVER done regular 100% water changes was on a betta bowl that had no filter, and I did them every 2-3 days to prevent any amonia from building up in the first place. This is less stressful than subjecting the fish to amonia and or nitrite for the 2nd half of the week. IMO any longer than that can raise amonia/nitrate to dangerous levels.
WITH a filter, I always cycle the tank through the spikes, amonia, then nitrite, and only when the nitrite spike has dropped to 0ppm do I swap out any feeder fish used in the process for the fish I plan to stock for show. Usually takes 4-6 weeks, and if not overfed the goldfish usually survive if they were healthy to start with. I use goldfish because I've heard that they have a large amount of baceria in their feces to jumpstart the tank, but if you have an established tank it's better to use a handful of substrate to seed the new one instead.
After the initial cycle water changes up to 50% at most, prefferably 20%-30% are a regular thing to remove nitrates as you said on the other forum, and for the purpose of removing ditritus/waste/fallen foliage, etc, from the tank by gravel vac to prevent these from causing a sudden spike in anomia from having so much stuff biodegrading all of a sudden (especially in planted tanks!) and releasing it, which the current amount of bacteria might not be able to handle immidiately. Such a spike may be small, and the bacteria will quickly catch up to it, but it's needless stress on the tank inhabitants. Being that the ppl on that forum VERY LIKELY do not have live plants in their tanks, they are not going to take this into account in most cases. The less water removal required to remove the nitrates the better, but 50% is NOT going to kill your fish. Agreeing to disagree on this point is NOT going to kill your fish. That claim was made simply to enforce a "I'm right, you're wrong" attitude that was childish and missplaced, and frankly, VERY annoying. If you are taking a long period of time between removal of old water and replenishing the volume of the tank the glass may dry out sufficiently to kill off the bacteria on it, but that is NOT sufficient to cause a notable minicycle and will not happen at all if you refiull the tank in a reasonable amount of time. The WORST you will do in this case is remove more nitrates and microscopic debre from the water column than planned, which hurts NOTHING.
Your process is fine and they are wrong.
WITH a filter, I always cycle the tank through the spikes, amonia, then nitrite, and only when the nitrite spike has dropped to 0ppm do I swap out any feeder fish used in the process for the fish I plan to stock for show. Usually takes 4-6 weeks, and if not overfed the goldfish usually survive if they were healthy to start with. I use goldfish because I've heard that they have a large amount of baceria in their feces to jumpstart the tank, but if you have an established tank it's better to use a handful of substrate to seed the new one instead.
After the initial cycle water changes up to 50% at most, prefferably 20%-30% are a regular thing to remove nitrates as you said on the other forum, and for the purpose of removing ditritus/waste/fallen foliage, etc, from the tank by gravel vac to prevent these from causing a sudden spike in anomia from having so much stuff biodegrading all of a sudden (especially in planted tanks!) and releasing it, which the current amount of bacteria might not be able to handle immidiately. Such a spike may be small, and the bacteria will quickly catch up to it, but it's needless stress on the tank inhabitants. Being that the ppl on that forum VERY LIKELY do not have live plants in their tanks, they are not going to take this into account in most cases. The less water removal required to remove the nitrates the better, but 50% is NOT going to kill your fish. Agreeing to disagree on this point is NOT going to kill your fish. That claim was made simply to enforce a "I'm right, you're wrong" attitude that was childish and missplaced, and frankly, VERY annoying. If you are taking a long period of time between removal of old water and replenishing the volume of the tank the glass may dry out sufficiently to kill off the bacteria on it, but that is NOT sufficient to cause a notable minicycle and will not happen at all if you refiull the tank in a reasonable amount of time. The WORST you will do in this case is remove more nitrates and microscopic debre from the water column than planned, which hurts NOTHING.
Your process is fine and they are wrong.
