Reasons Why Im Not Doing Water Changes Anymore.

Tangchaser · Jan 5, 2016

I decided not to do water changes in February of 2015. Mainly because I tend to work out of town for sometimes as long as a month if not more. Why for that reason you ask? Well because of work I bought an apex and some brs dosers and started auto dosing my tank with calcium, alk, and mag. Dialing everything in didn't take long and worked great. Water stability was awesome till I did a water change. This whole time I noticed that when I was doing water chages the salt mix was always different from how my tank was leveling out. With each water change I felt like paramiters would shift too much. Most of this was because I was doing larger monthly water changes instead of smaller weekly water changes. Anyone who has been in the hobby for a wile knows that stability in water paramiters is a must.
After reading some articles on dutch systems and seeing amazing results from people that were dosing instead of doing water changes, I decided I would give it a go. The whole reason for water changes are to export waste and import chems. Well I'm exporting waste through a Aquamaxx c02 skimmer, Brs reactor, and micro algae. I'm importing nutrients from dosing with brs dosers ran from an apex controller.
Since Febuary 2015 I have cut down on losses on newly introduced corals, managed to keep a wild acro colony, and have seen some great growth. Water paramiters have been constant and I have been able to go on a month long jobs with out any change of water paramiters.
I write this just to inform people about whats working for me. I'm not here to change your mind or say water changes are bad. If what your doing works keep doing it.

Some pics of my strawberry short cake acro.

June 2015

Jan 2016

DLuce510 · Jan 5, 2016

Totally agree, I've got way too much invested in my system to loose everything from a bucket of salt that some of my Acros cost more than. Would love to see how your experience pans out over time.

Latino277 · Jan 5, 2016

I'll follow along here.

KingTriton · Jan 5, 2016

Well if I'm not mistaken water changes help with exporting a build up of metals. A single water change shouldn't have a large affect on your overall parameters and stability. That said I always adjust my nsw before a water change with calcium chloride but hey if its working why bother

larangcon · Jan 5, 2016

Almost one year without any water changes, and the growth spurts is amazing. The Strawberry Shortcake has doubled in size in 6 months! I could not even match that growth in a year with my SSC. Maybe I should give this a try.

Bunnee911 · Jan 5, 2016

Following

PeterErc · Jan 5, 2016

what happens when your salinity goes up from dosing magnesium and calcium?

Randy Holmes-Farley · Jan 5, 2016

Tangchaser said:
The whole reason for water changes are to export waste and import chems. Well I'm exporting waste through a Aquamaxx c02 skimmer, Brs reactor, and micro algae.

What is a CO2 skimmer? [edit, never mind, I see it is a name, not carbon dioxide

]

FWIW, I'm not trying to suggest folks need to do water changes, but there are other reason to do water changes as well. These include exporting organics and accumulating metals, and correcting imbalances in the major ions such as chloride/sulfate.

jetmaker · Jan 5, 2016

I stop water changes at 3 mths always have

jetmaker · Jan 5, 2016

The main thing people forget to dose is Trace elements

ygon · Jan 5, 2016

I have the same experience. I do a 20 to 30 % water change around once every six months. I just keep an eye on algea, if it starts getting out of control I do a water change. I have great coral growth. My system has been running this way for close to 3 years now. Also I don't dose I use coral pro salt mix and Ro di water.

NanaReefer · Jan 5, 2016

I went from 5 1/2g bi-weekly to once monthly. That was hard! [emoji2]

Tangchaser · Jan 5, 2016

Wow didn't know this thread would get this attention so fast.

PeterErc said:
what happens when your salinity goes up from dosing magnesium and calcium?

I test for mag/cal/alk/salinity along with other things like iodine, strontium, and other things.

jetmaker said:
The main thing people forget to dose is Trace elements

I can only stress testing before dosing but agree with the addition of trace elements. I have seen drops in several different elements before dosing.

Tangchaser · Jan 6, 2016

Randy Holmes-Farley said:
What is a CO2 skimmer? [edit, never mind, I see it is a name, not carbon dioxide ]

FWIW, I'm not trying to suggest folks need to do water changes, but there are other reason to do water changes as well. These include exporting organics and accumulating metals, and correcting imbalances in the major ions such as chloride/sulfate.

Big fan and love reading your articles.

From my understanding my way of ridding metals would be through export of micro algae growth and from carbon. In this article you posted http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-04/rhf/feature/ you state that copper will be chelated with naturally occurring humic acid. From my understanding once this occurs it is able to be picked up and removed by carbon. I base this knowledge from what I'm reading from how Triton is marketing there product Detox. Now Im just a guy that works on turbine generators for a living that has a reef tank so what I might be saying is total hoshposh.

Randy Holmes-Farley · Jan 6, 2016

Tangchaser said:
Big fan and love reading your articles.

From my understanding my way of ridding metals would be through export of micro algae growth and from carbon. In this article you posted http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-04/rhf/feature/ you state that copper will be chelated with naturally occurring humic acid. From my understanding once this occurs it is able to be picked up and removed by carbon. I base this knowledge from what I'm reading from how Triton is marketing there product Detox. Now Im just a guy that works on turbine generators for a living that has a reef tank so what I might be saying is total hoshposh.

GAC and macroalgae help, but there are plenty of folks with elevated metals who already do those things and need additional assistance. Detox can also help remove some metals. So will things like Boyd polyfilters, Cuprisorb, Metasorb, etc.

I'm not sure they are a better path than a water change for normal situations, but if you are going without water changes (or have a significant problem) and have certain elevated metals, they may be a good choice.

cb684 · Jan 6, 2016

Stability can be also reached with continuous / semi-continuous water changes...

KingTriton · Jan 6, 2016

I manually dose calcium chloride to my IO to boost calcium levels for my NSW, but dose B-ionic daily in the tank. As Randy has stated above water changes help me prevent high chloride levels.

Tangchaser · Jan 6, 2016

Here is a pic of growth on my montipora corals. keep in mind there has been multiple frags cut from the montipora hirsute, orange digitata, and yellow lantana in the time period.

and here is a pic of some coral growth problem. I have also fragged this guy several times this year due to issues like this.

img host