How many water changes can i do?

[Aidanwolf]

How many water changes can I do without effecting my benifical bacteria, to get rid of nitrates?

 

[Fishgeek88]

How old is the tank? And how much water do you plan on taking out per change?

 

[Aidanwolf]

3 years, it is a 29 gallon biocube and I usually take about 5 gallons each water change.

 

[40B Knasty]

Try to do a 100% overturn in one month.
For example:
16g biocube
4 weeks x 4 gallons(25%)= 16g = 100% overturned
40g
4 weeks x 10g (25%)= 40g = 100% overturned
120g
4 weeks x 30g(25%)=120g =100% overturned

 

[singleshot]

I would think once a tank is well established you could do a 100% change each time you do a WC, I have a 14g biocube and do a 5g water change each week

 

[40B Knasty]

BRS does a video on WCs. They say 15%, 30%, 15%, 70%. Putting you at 130% overturn. That will always keep your nitrates low. Doing more than the good rule of thumb of 100%. It really depends on your feeding, live rock to bioload filtration, skimmer to bioload filtration, and sump/HOB filtration to bioload. So if you have live rocks with great porosity that is equal to the gallons of your tank or more and keep the rule of thumb of max fish size inches to tank size. You will be good at keeping a great water quality and not having any major nitrate spikes above 10ppm. That's with with feeding 2x a day.
With a 29g 7.25 gallons a week.

 

[Aidanwolf]

Okay thanks

 

[reefwiser]

Bacteria lives on the rock work or ceramic material not in the water column. As long as you do not change the water chemistry much there should not be an issue with how much you change. Keep temperature and Alk the same as the tank water if you change a lot of volume at one time.

 

[Aidanwolf]

Okay thanks for the info.