Water Change Frequency

wapfish

Prolific Poster
Sep 25, 2005
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Tom,

How frequently can one carry out 50% water changes without it becoming counter-productive, assuming EI dosing is maintained? Could it be done every day or every other day, for example?

One thing that comes to mind is that every time I do a water change, I dose ammonia from the chloramine neutralization. Since my water has 2.5ppm chloramine, a 50% change will yield somewhere around .8 ppm NH3 each time. Not good in terms of possibly inducing algae germination, right?

Other reasons?

Or are frequent changes OK, but simply unnecessary?
 

Laith

Lifetime Charter Member
Lifetime Member
Jan 24, 2005
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Geneva, Switzerland
Re: Water Change Frequency

You're not using a good dechlorinator.

Good decholorinators (eg. Seachem Prime etc.) do not only neutralize the chlorine in chloramine but also neutralize the resulting ammonia.

If you want to do more frequent water changes than once a week, you can reduce the % I guess. For example 25% twice a week...

I've actually extended the water changes in some tanks to 10 days (still 50%) with the same EI dosage. I'll probably extend it further to 14 days as a test but will probably reduce the fert dosing in that case.
 

wapfish

Prolific Poster
Sep 25, 2005
34
0
6
Re: Water Change Frequency

Laith said:
You're not using a good dechlorinator.

Good decholorinators (eg. Seachem Prime etc.) do not only neutralize the chlorine in chloramine but also neutralize the resulting ammonia.

If you want to do more frequent water changes than once a week, you can reduce the % I guess. For example 25% twice a week...

I've actually extended the water changes in some tanks to 10 days (still 50%) with the same EI dosage. I'll probably extend it further to 14 days as a test but will probably reduce the fert dosing in that case.

Sorry, didn't make myself clear. I do use Prime and I understand that it "neutralizes" ammonia as well as chlorine. The neutralized ammonia is nevertheless available to the biofilter and is cleared by it, so I assumed it would also be available to plants. I think the ammonia is bound up by complex sulfites (?) in Prime, so there's no guarantee plants or algae would see it the same way they see normal ammonia/ammonium, but since bacateria can get at it, I'd think the plants/algae could too. Maybe this isn't so.

In terms of WC frequency, I was just interested in what Tom felt in general about the idea of increasing water column turnover. Good, bad, or neutral?