No water changes
 

Has anybody ran a reef tank without doing water changes. I've ran into several people who claim that they do not do water changes they just top up evaporation. None of these folks had skimmers either. I bought a running aquarium with live rock from a lady who didn't know that I had experience with marine setups and before we sealed the deal she told me that it was important to not clean the sand or change any water. The rock was covered with nuisance algae. I did a 50 percent water change and washed the sand in the old tank water to get rid of all the dirt and stuff(the water was damn near cocoa) and 2 weeks later the algae was gone and then a month later every bit of exposed branch rock was covered with thick and bright purple coraline. the tank was about 5 years old. I just wanted to know what people on the board thought of "no water changes". I love water changes, everything looks new again.

I very very rairly do a water change on my reef. i just add the water to compensate for the evap, and thats about it. as for the sand bed, i do get my paws in there atleast once every week or 2 and mix it up a bit. not like a hurricane, just enough to release the nitrate gas pockets. then my skimmer goes into overkill mode for a few days, and then its clean again.

on the odd, occasion, i may do a water change, like when im starting another tank,i will take about 20% of my water and use it for the new system. and then just top off the reef tank with fresh saltwater.

i have no algae problems, and never have had actually. knock on wood.

wow this s very interesting i have herd of no water changes but had yet to hear any feed back.

Looking forward to hearing more.

My old system I went over a year with out a water change ... new one has been up and running sense Sept and only did the first one a couple weeks back .. depends on the BIO load ... how many fish how often and how much you feed, water volume, and filtration .. mechanical .. or natural... and what you have for a clean up crew, if you have Macro Algae ...many different factors ...

I varried from 1 per month to 1 per year.. no real differance as loong as you adding the depleted minerals with a Ca reactor or by dosing.

Steve

WOW, if this is real, but then why does all fish shop staffs recommend people to do water change? Or do you need a huge skimmer / refugium so one can get away from water change? :sad:

Water changes facilitate the addition of trace elements and removal of waste. Even if you can have a healthy tank without regular water changes there is no real reason for most people not to do them. It's not like you need to do them daily/weekly, so compared to other types of tank maintenance you really don't invest a lot of time into them in the grand scheme of things.

Reef tanks require the removal of organic waste & detritus and as Steve said, the replacement of depleted minerals or such.

How thats achieved is variable. Water changes, good skimmers, large algae refugiums or algae turf scrubbers, carbon, ozone and the replacement parts handled by again water changes, reactors or the addition of 2-part supplements.

Most of the experienced aquarists use a combination of water changes & filtration to achieve beautiful tanks such as those displayed in our feature,s.

I very rarely do water changes(Last one over 6 months ago).
Both of my systems have skimmers, I add minerals and my livestock is doing great.

same reason as they recomend you change out your bulbs befor you need to.. makes them money.

you do frequent water changes you buy more salt.

remember water changes are a tool and you still need them, but with the right equipment you can extend the time between them.

Steve

One very experienced reefer put it into prospective for me once.

He said changing your water is like opening a window in your house after a long winter, you don't have to but the fresh air sure is nice.

Wonder what in-land public aquariums do? Realize we're talking larger volumes and that dilution/solution/pollution thing, but the costs and efforts for a 10% bi-weekly change on a 10,000g system...

This is the key. Newbies are gonna stumble when they see a thread like this. You NEED to have good equipment to get away with no/low waterchanges. Don't be thinkin that your over stocked 'low-tech' 90g with a Remora Pro and a sack of PhosBan is gonna cut it.

Replacing the vitamins and minerals is a very important thing. As well as nutrient removal. A calcium reactor will replace the minerals and many vitamins. I use SeaChem Reef Plus to replace amino acids and vitamins, you can also use Reefresh or Polyp Lab or ZeoVit. But if you aren't doing waterchanges regularly you need to be adding something.

You will also need a good nutrient export. A very good skimmer like a Bubblemaster, EuroReef, Deltec etc will hugely lengthen the time between needed waterchanges. Incorporating a refugium will also help.

Bioload has a HUGE impact on the length of time between waterchanges. Lots of fish? Less time between.

Attempting no/low waterchanges on a low-tech tank without supplementing for minerals and vitamins is not going to work very well for you.

My tank is low-tech and I do 15% waterchanges every 3-4 weeks. The corals tell me when it's time.

Thank you all
 

:biggrin: Thanks everyone for all your advise. I am glad to know I can come to this site and get lots opinion and advise. This is great. Thanks again:smile:

I think that feeding your fish is a significant form of supplementation.

ive had a 90 gal up and running for 8 weeks now not even 1 water change ive loaded up the system too ive got a tang, clown, 5 damsels, huge neon wrasse, mushroom corals, and a bubbletip anemone i use marine snow, purple up, and 2 skimmers one is a woodlimestone skimmer the other is made by instant ocean i think im doing great for a noobie:biggrin: and to think i was starting to worry about doing a water change even though my nitrates are under 20 ppm i guess that being said no water changes for atleast another month:n00b:

i've done about 2 water changes since September, mind you I only have 2 fish.

Eek! This is exactly what I meant. Your tank isn't the type of setup that is good for a low or no waterchange scheme. This will cause you trouble. I think ALL newbies should be doing 10-15% waterchanges once a week or once every couple weeks. ESPECIALLY when your equipment isn't top of the line.

no my equipment isnt top of the line but i have 2 skimmers each rated for aquariums up tp 100 gallons so that being said i should be good for 200 gallons:mrgreen:

Just because a skimmer is rated for X gallons sometimes doesn't mean it's any good for even half the gallons. PLUS, cheap skimmers are crap on ANY size tank. Don't fool yourself...you'll be more successful.

Umm you aren't doing very well for a Newbie. Any Nitrates in your tank are bad (it burns your poor fishes gills) and any real reefer will do everything in their power to get them down to 0. I suggest a water change ASAP or you're just being mean.

Anything around 20 ppm is way too high. That means you need to do a water change. Your anenome will thank you. Try to keep them at least below 5 ppm or better yet undetectable.

I am asuming from all the happy faces you are joking, er I hope so anyways.. I am talking a system with perfect water condidions. when I did do my rare water changes, amonia, nitrate and nitrite were all still undetectable. I used both a Ca reactor and a kalk reactor, my skimmer was probably rated for 4 times my water volume, and I had low fish stalking and I feed on the lower side. don't use nitrates as a deciding factor as when you see them you should have already done one if your system can't handle them.

also don't be scared of large waterchanges.. I used to do 20% changes and if I decided I needed a big one I would do 80% and I have even done a couple 100% changes when I moved tanks ect.. as long as your salinity, PH, Ca, Alk and temp are very close you should be fine.

Steve

I hate it when my fish stalk eachother. :p Sorry I just had to. :D

I find it best to steer newbies away from large waterchanges for many reasons. One being that they aren't usually very good at matching water params, and two because they often figure that doing 75% waterchanges once every 6 months is the same as doing weekly 10%. Newbies shouldn't be given some information... :lol:

Who here has an SPS tank?

HAHAHA! Good question.

well I did go out and buy a couple of jars nitrate of sponges today i put them in nylon bags and into the sump BTW i was only kidding about the water change thing, i did do one earlier this week 20% or so. but my nitrates still stayed at
20 ppm I also know that zero nitrates is an impossible level to obtain any living tank will have some nitrates a person knows they are doing exceptionally well when nitrate levels are around 5 ppm in a few weeks with the aid of this sponge material, i should expect to see my nitrates drop considerably any suggestions on how to drop them sooner would be greatly appreciated. i do know my biological filters are working because i haven't seen any detectable ammonia yet
all i can see is the nitrates that they are producing and yes i really am a newbie

If you cannot match parameters in a water change you should seek out a lite-brite for that is the limit of your capable skills. Seriously water change are the best friend to people new to marine tanks. It is simple to change water, if you know what you are doing, but then if you know what you are doing most things are simple. If you notice in this hobby for every "you can't or shouldn't do that" there is a "i did it and it work fine for me". The only thing that is for sure is as you grow in this hobby you gain experience, without the reality of learning from your mistakes and actually running an maintaining a tank you have theoretical knowledge and that is it. Theory is good in theory only. There is a reason WISDOM and AGE go hand in hand, not beacuse one is older but because chances are the older you are (in this case the longer you have run a tank for) the more mistakes you have made and learned from. Keep in mind learning for yourself when asking questions, i guarantee you have people telling you both sides of a question. The only way to find out is to try.

That being said water changes worked for me when i was new to the hobby, I have also seen water changes kill a tank in 20 minutes (yes everything was done the same, most likely bad salt....another key to many problems, test you new water before and after you mix the salt. Unless you trust your RO/DI unit religiously....I also use tap water...i also test it for many things most people do not.

I try to do 20% water changes every week. Sometimes it gets forgotten for a week but never more then two. Of course I have a very high bio load and I feed my fish lots, so for me if I didn't do water changes often I'd be in big trouble.

me.. why?

actualy it would be just under 2 months not 6 :biggrin: but interesting you bring this up as there is an old debate from about 4 or more years ago on wether leage or small waterchanges are better. then an article came out that showed the dilution effect of both small and large over time. what it boiled down to is small ones will never get rid of someting and actualy did pourly compared to 60 or 80% (can't remember exactly what they compared it againsts off hand)

Steve

this is the basis for reef keeping, if they arn't very good then they should be practicing befor they even start or not start at all. after all it isn't rocket science and if retailers would take the proper time to show them how to do the measurments and what equipment they realy need instead of what would make them the most money they would be better off.

Steve

I'm running zeo now so I am commited to weekly water changes, although small ones.

We're all here to learn and all newbies to point, post your experiences.

I run an SPS tank, I've been reasonably successful over the years. I schedule a 20g water change every two weeks. This means every 10 weeks I need to spend $50 on salt. That is a requisite cost of the hobby. My corals grow at stupidly fast rates, my longest lived fish was 9 years old, and everything does well in my tank. I don't supplement magnesium, I don't use zeovit, I add nothing that doesn't come from my Ca reactor or the water change.
As it's pointed out, the water change is at the very least some "fresh air" for the inhabitants. I cannot understand for the life of me why anyone would not want to do water changes. Is the 30 minutes twice a month too much time invested? $200/year in salt too much money? Or we think that fish prefer to swim in their own waste over fresh water? I don't get it. Kinda like not washing your underwear between wearings, IMO :)

Tell us how you really feel Brad. :lol: I could not agree more with your entire post.

Well said there Brad :biggrin:

IMO water changes are a must too, I had a fully stocked reef tank for over ten years and not that I am boasting or anything but the reef was very successful. I owe most of that success to two things one being water changes and two education. The hobby of reef keeping IS rocket science, and not a plug and play venture. Spending hundreds of hours reading various books and articles and talking with fellow hobbyist on boards and in person was a major reason I believe my tank did so well. The water changes were the second ingredient to my success, I think in just under 11 years I could count on one hand how many month water changes I had missed. I never had to add supplements because of this until the last two years until I made the switch to sps corals, this is when I had to dose calcium as the amount of corals I had effected the balance of the system even with my regular water changes, I could not retain the calcium levels within the system. During the last year while the tank was running, my interest and focuses changed which led to less water changes and simply less attention with the tank, this started to cause problems such as algae troubles and fish and coral deaths.
Now after a year off I have set up a small fowlr tank which is doing really well, which I can say water changes and knowledge are the two main factors for things doing so well.
Finally, if a natural reef gets flushed with thousands of gallons of water every second of the day and night, I believe we owe it to the animals that we keep in our systems to provide them with a clean and stable environment as best as we can :biggrin:

Good post. I don't understand the no waterchange thing either. Laziness is the culprit most likely I think.

I don't supplement magnesium either, but I do test for it. IO keeps my magnesium at 1350-1360 ppm.

Another excellent post.

ah, but you do.. your Ca reactor adds Mg.:mrgreen:

anyways I don't think anyone is saying they are not necessary, just that they may not be necessary as often as some people think. I know you try for two week intervals but how often do you actually make that schedule. I try for 1 month intervals and I make it about 30 to 50% of the time. On my fresh water tanks I do an 80% change once a month but now that I have some new babies in there I will have to skip it this month till they are a little bigger.

are they necessary, yes, but depending on the equipment you have they may only be necessary every second month. as for money, not an issue, heck people spend more than that on corals in a week.

as for trace elements.... does synthetic salt contain all the trace elements we need? I don't know.

and no it is not rocket science. water maintenance is simply a matter of knowing how to do a test and reading instructions to come to the results. you do not have to pick formulas to work out ionic equations, you don't need a degree. does taking a chem class in school help, ya, but remembering that class is even better:mrgreen: it is all simplified so there is not much thinking on our parts, do we read a tone of books.. yes but this is for our personal knowledge and for tips and tricks, most books are nothing more than some ones method that worked for them and for every book that shows one way there are others that say a different way, so by reading these books we are doing nothing more than deciding which way fits our needs.

Steve

Here's the simple question then...other than temperature, salinity, de-chlorination and taking out ammonia. Are there any other tricks, tips, neccessities when doing a water change?