How exactly should a water change be done?
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at
12:25 am
How should I change the water? How much do i change at a time? What water do i use, do I add salt (i have mollies) everytime? What about the treatment solution? Can you please give me a good run down on how to do a decent water change? Much appreciated!
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Theres several methods people use but it should go like this, based of course on a few prerequisites.
1) For freshwater aquaria, water changes should be based on bioload and nitrate production, and should equate to around 20 -25 percent of the total water volume, to do bigger water changes than that can destabilise aquaria and the more sensitive species may wane, which is why small bowls and tiny aquaria are so crap, you find yourself having to change out too much water.. A tank that isnt overstocked should be producing no more than a relative 10 ppm of nitrate per week, enabling you to keep the nitrates under 40 ppm with a 20-25 percent water change. If it gets higher than that , your overstocked.
The water itself should go into a bucket first, never directly into the tank, and there you condition it with conditioners like stresscoat or aquasafe at least 5 minutes in advance of it going into the tank. Chlorine and chloramine are contact bacterial killers and may immediately annihilate useful nitrosoma and nitrobacter bacteria if you pour tapwater straight into a tank.
People say not to use the hot water tap, but to be honest thats needless paranoia, based around the fear of heavy metals entering the tank, but the conditioner should handle this and indeed when water pipes and hot water tanks age, they get barrier carbons minerals on them that stop metals entering the tanks, and as for the mains water pipes, you dont know if they are copper, lead, pvc or concrete, so all the paranoia about using the hot water tap is needless.
What you dont do is use the kettle, as it is a place of evaporation and very likely to retain calcite minerals,then throw them off in large quantities, thus hiking the ph, they shed metals with the intense and regular changes in heat when they boil at an unpredicatble rate, but the average will be much higher than a hot tap unless you have a small inline boiler, people with big boilers need not fear, their carbon coating rarely cracks free. You can use both the cold and hot tap to balance the temperature of the water so that it exactly matches the existing tank temperatures.
New water should not go in too cold or too hot, because you can inflict swimbladder and maldigestion problems on the fish, and if you keep water in a bucket for over a day it can become oxygen depleted, meaning the fish may struggle for breath when the new water is added and lowers the level of available oxygen.
Most of the good water conditioners perform their function in as little as ten minutes, so theres no need to keep water hanging around than that. Personally I prefer to use the hot and the cold tap, condition the water religiously before it ever hits tankwater and check the temp with a thermometer. Once it matches the tankwater , in it goes, poured gently.
Old time fishkeepers, myself included, used to not bother with conditioners , and just leave the water to evaporate off with an airstone in for 24-48 hours, but now with flourides, metals, and chloramine in tapwater, conditioning is a safer more pragmatic way to do it. All the chemicals in tapwater that are harmful to fish no longer all evaporate off, and a good quality water conditioner should be used.
Substrates always need a modicum of cleaning , so youd be better off using a gravel vac every time you do a change, ensuring that in tank mulm levels and thusly opportunities for decompositional bacteria and fungi remain low. Its always better to do water changes weekly rather than monthly, that way the fish arent exposed to radically changing conditions, and the levels stay roughly consistant.
When selecting a good water conditioner, check that it neutralises chlorine , chloramines, and metals like copper, stuff like aloe and others are usually unwanted gimmicks that merely add to the nitrates eventually produced.
Salt is optional for plays and mollies, but most true freshwater fish should be kept entirely without aquarium salt added unless you are specifically trying to guard against nitrite damage at the begginning of cycling with fish, or combatting minor fungal infections.
Salt is way overused in this hobby, and its actually counterproductive, often forcing fish into coping with long term thickening of gill tissue, long term osmotic issues, and of course giving fungi and protozoans an opportunity to become salt resistant. You can thank the incessant users of salt for making whitespot become ever more immune to salt. Salt is useful under appropriate use, it is not there to be used all the time with freshwater fish, and many catfish are salt intolerant and can die very quickly under salt exposures. Cories for example should not be exposed to salt.
If you come from an extremely hardwater area, yet have a love of acid water amazon fish, you might ph buffer the water in the bucket, or use a 50/50 split with reverse osmosis water.
Those with soft water may add minerals.
Generally theres a way round any water quality, for those living effectively off the grid sufferring 3rd world water, you can set up a big container with a pump an oxygenator and inline UV sterilisation to nail protozoa and bacteria, those in inner cities or near farm runoff can use denitrating resins, and denitrating coils involving nitrosoma bacteria to get the levels down, or again use RO.
Every effort should be made to get ph and hardness correct for the species you keep so that they may enjoy longevity, good health, excellent respiration and breeding success.
2) Brackish tanks can be done much the same way, but youll need to top up salt a bit and its better to measure the gravity than to guess, because even brackish fish have an upper salinity limit, and there will be changing levels according to water evaporation and the changes, so its better to keep a tab on the usual levels rather than guess them.
3) Marine tanks usually use RO water, so again people dont need conditioners, but may add minerals and salts to match the requirements of their fish and corals. Reverse osmosis water contains almost no hardness, and marine creatures need the salts and calcites so you buy salts to add at recommnded levels, and again you should monitor you salinity to check you arent overdoing or underdoing it.
Generally using tapwater in marine tanks is not recommended. RO is much better.
Hope that helps.
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Well good size tanks, 10 gallons at least should be changed once a week. 25% of the water should be taken out using a gravel syphon. This way, you can clean out debris from the gravel, while taking water out at the same time. Tap water is fine, make sure it is the same temperature as the temperature in the tank (I just take the thermometer out of my tank and put into the bowl for new water). Add the correct amount of dechlorinator and syphon the water back into your tank (if you pour it, it will disturb the fish a lot more). I don’t know about salt.
You can buy a small bucket, you want something clean that hasn’t had chemicals, detergent, soaps, etc. in it. Then put one end of the syphon in the bucket, get the water pumping out, and start cleaning. Then you can empty the bucket and put new water in, or already have some water ready in another container.
A water change is not all that complicated. First thing to remember, you don’t want to "shock" your fish. If you have chemically treated water, let it set for a day or so first. You also want the water the same temperature as your tank water. You can add a small amount of pond salt to your tank, all fishtanks should actually have a touch of salt. Read the label first, you don’t want to over salt. When you do change the water, don’t change anymore than half. If you change more than that, you will have a tank that gets cloudy in a few days, it will be like starting up a brand new tank, the water will have to cycle all over again, and it will get cloudier before it gets clearer. Add some stress coat to the water too, this eases the fish’s tress of new water.So- no more than 1\2 water change, same temp., let water set to remove chemicals and add stress coat, that’s it.. It’s not really that complicated at all.
just did mine,,,.. by tonight it should look great…