Water Changes

Most of my holding tanks and personal tanks have large skimmers to handle high bioloads. Some reef tanks have ca reactors. When I do water changes, I dont have all day as I have many tanks, I mix the salt, let it clear, and dump it in. Ive never had any bad side effects from doing so. And I never do very large water changes.

I recently took apart a personal tank that I had setup and left the same for 3 years. It was a 77gallon Hagen, undrilled. It had 2 Hagen 802 powerheads, 1 Fluval 404 canister filter with bio material in it only, 1 tronic 200W heater, a 3"deep fine argonite subtrate, 120lbs of live rock from all different locales. Livestock was a Blue Regal Tang, a Heteractis Magnifica with 2 Goldstripe Maroon Clowns, a Flameangel, 2 Cleaner Shrimp, 1 Hawiian Cleaner Wrase. It had about 50 blue leg and scarlet hermits and 25 nasarius, 25 astrea, 10 turbo, 10 mexican, 3 trochus, 3 money cowrie, 1 carribean hairy reef hermit. There were many different macro algaes growing from the rock and subtrate, there was 1 green frogspawn, 1 green bubble, 1 devils hand, 1 fiji gold mushroom, 1 green open brain, 1 long tentacle plate, 1 sun coral, 1 purple goniapora, 1 alveapora, a dozen blue mushrooms, a dozen red mushrooms, a handfull of ricordia, and 1 pink birdsnest. The tank was lit with 1 IceCap 660 ballast overdriving 2 Philips 03Atinic and 2 Vita Lites. I changed the bulbs once a year for 3 years. I would say that I added no more than 4 cups of instant ocean saltmix to the tank in 3 years. I had a large bucket on top of the canopy that had aged tapwater in it, it was on a float valve to keep the tank topped up from evaporation, I would add fresh tap water to the bucket every week or so. The only food that I ever put in the tank was frozen and freze dried Mysis shrimp, sometimes supplemented with selcon. For the corals and macro algae I used Salifert all in one coral grower, and salifert iodine. I added the salifert every 2-3 weeks. I never cleaned the fluval once, the powerheads were always on, the lights were on for 12hours a day. There was no protien skimmer and the water parameters were always in the excellent range!
I would say that this was a very simple setup, but it worked well and required almost no maintence. I only added a half cup of salt to the tank a few times in 3 years due to saltcreep. The tank looked beautiful and everything was very healthy, all specimens are still healthy in other tanks. I wont recommend that everyone try this but It did work for me.
With proper balance a simple setup can easily maintain a healthy reef.
Of course all my current tanks have all the bells and whistles, mostly due to the fact that I move too many livestock in my tanks and cannot maintain balance in bioloads so I skim them like theres no tomorrow