I'm kind of all over the map on this one. Testing, I generally try to test for the things I watch out for once per week, but sometimes fall off the wagon and will let it slide. Tonight I tested Ca, Alk, Mg, NO3 on 3 tanks and PO4 and K on 1. That was a solid hour of testing!! I hate it when I need to do that but it had been 2-3 weeks since my last battery of tests. Ideally I just test a couple parameters one day then some others another day.
Water changes .. I try to do one big one (25%-33%) once per month, but sometimes let this slide too. But I aim for monthly for the big ones, clean out the sump, etc.
Now that I'm doing zeovit on one tank, on that tank in particular I'm doing 10% weekly changes but am still going to aim to do the big one monthly just because there's a fair bit of mud accumulating in the sump that needs to be shop-vac'd out.
2 out of 3 tanks I dose powdered supplements ("two parts dosing" daily - one morning, one evening) and the other tank has reactors.
The nice thing about the two-part dosing is that the same stuff works on multiple tanks. But it's manual labour, the reactors are a nice automation, but then there's an investment required in the infrastructure. Running 3 reactors on 3 tanks is probably outside of most people's budgets. Then again running 3 tanks is outside of my budget and the costs seem to be only rising, I'll likely be simplifying things at some point just because this isn't a sustainable pace for me anymore.
__________________
-- Tony
My next hobby will be flooding my basement while repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall and tearing up $100 bills. Whee!
|