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Old 02-20-2014, 02:09 PM
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Aquattro Aquattro is offline
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Location: Victoria, BC
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kien View Post
This is a very good question and I'm curious myself. We are all trained to believe that a water change is the bees knees, but if you're running on balling, have a really good skimmer and run carbon to take out dissolved organics, then is it ?
I think that's a reasonable question only if we assume a close to 100% efficiency in our methods of removing and adding things. But I'm sure for every cup of crap my skimmer pulls, it leaves a cup. Carbon? Is it removing everything bad? For how long? What is dosing/balling adding that we don't account for? Is it harmful if it builds too high? In my mind, all these things simple prolong how long you can go between changes. For my comfort level, that's 2 weeks. Maybe I can go longer, maybe not. There's really no way to tell. So based on the effort it takes and the cost of salt and water, I've chosen a schedule that works for me, my wallet and my tank. As I said earlier, using the same equipment across multiple tanks, this one, with the more frequent changes, is by far my most successful tank. YMMV
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