Wasted water solution

[wookie]

Originally Posted by paddyob

Water your household plants.

The water is brackish.... not full on salt. Cant be using that much salt in your system.

Also.... 5 gallons a week????? If you have a lot of pollutants in your tank maybe you are over feeding.

With a good filter and with good feeding habits you should be able to go a month on a 55 without doing a water change.

I never water change more than once a month.

Okay, maybe I don't need to change it once a week? I thought it was standard practice to change the water 10% weekly?

Not overfeeding. The water usually looks pretty clean. Just thought it was standard practice.

I don't really have many houseplants - actually I've got a pathetic amount. Two Cylinder vases with the fake bamboo shoots (lucky bamboo). I'm high brackish, 1.016... Don't know how that would do for normal house plants. I figured this was a good exercise for getting some more plants as well haha.

Originally Posted by zoaElite

I really like the idea as I'm running something similar but I don't know how well a separate system will work for filtration purpose.

The reason for water changes is two fold, first to remove contaminants but we also do water changes to replace major and minor elements depleted out of the water. Placing waste water in a mangrove tank will take care of a large portion of the contaminants but if anything it will actually deplete those essential elements even more.

If you would like to increase the time between water changes what about plumbing your mangrove tank right into your system? This way the mangroves are supplied with a fresh supply of waste to process. Another problem you might run into with a separate system is that the water might actually become an anoxic, this could result in the production of Hydrogen sulfide and adding this water back into the tank could cause some problems.

This tank is plumbed into my 350g system, currently has about 150 mangroves in it and man do they grow fast!

I'm also running what I consider a "Cheato River", which is pretty much your exact design just a little longer with a bulkhead to tie it into the system. When I have frags they go in here, otherwise it's full of cheato.

Interesting regarding the elements (looking up anoxic, oh that doesn't sound good). Thanks for taking the time to write such a nice reply. I really like what you've got going on there. Unfortunately I'm not talented enough nor have the spare cash (or room) to build something like that. I also like the aesthetics of what I've got and don't want to take it a step further.

The thought of a large vase or a few appealed to me as decorative pieces for some plants. Hence the idea. But taking that next step into more aquatics seemed too much lol.

Regardless thanks for all the replies thus far.