A Water Change A Day...
- Thread starter mcarroll
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Day and water change #4
My excellent "Water Change A Day" setup:
I start the pump, add 20 oz. of salt, then drain five gallons from the display tank into another bucket.
Salt mix is done by then, so I dump all five gallons of new water in my sump.
Done!
Do you add a heater to the bucket also? or is it not necessary? i do 3-5 gallons every other day. But i add a heater. No powerhead just stir it up manually with RO water. But the water can get really cold since i store the RO water in big bins
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mcarroll
10K Club member
Generally not necessary.
If you don't have a sump, then I'd might take care to add the new water in more slowly, say with a pump, instead of dumping it all in at once as I do presently.....but that's just because I haven't experimented without a sump. It might be perfectly fine to dump it in all at once in that scenario too.
I figure that the temperature difference caused by a 10-20% (or even less in our cases) water change like this can't be much different than what would be caused by a rainstorm of frigid rain falling over a shallow reef and those critters get along fine.
FWIW
Standing water shouldn't get a lot colder than room temp, especially if it's sealed with a lid. As long as where you keep your RODI water is in the vicinity of 70-72ºF, you should be fine.
If your storage area is a lot colder than room temp*, I would pre-heat the five gallon batches of RODI water (only to about 60-70ºF to save unnecessary waiting time) as you need them in preference to heating the saltwater during/after mixing.
And for reference I just took the temperature of my RODI water. It's in the unfinished part of the basement and the water is about 63ºF. I use it virtually every single day like this.
-Matt
* Wonder if you could even have issues with dissolved CO2 and O2 levels being off if the water is very cold? A pH test of the saltwater after you mix it should tell you....anything around 8.4...maybe 8.5, or lower and I'd say there's no problem. If dissolved CO2 is lower than expected, pH could spike quite high so that why it makes a good test. Check out this graph for an illustration of why/how. Don't worry about this if your water isn't COLD.
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mcarroll
10K Club member
Sorry for the late reply, but no. There a probably lots of reasons, but my favorite is that the high pH would cause all the interesting parts of the salt mix to precipitate out.
Using tap water (treated for chloramines/chlorine as needed) is a much better option.
-Matt
Using tap water (treated for chloramines/chlorine as needed) is a much better option.
-Matt
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mcarroll
10K Club member
Woot! Congrats!
Wish I was in your shoes!
I may decide to throw some tax return money into an upgrade (Marineland 93 gallon frameless cube?)....long time coming, but it never materializes.
I'm sure everyone knows the syndrome!
-Matt
smpolyp
Community Member
Wow! sorry if I just have add. Small water changes are great with natural seawater if you do small % at any given time. However with synthetic salt. No way. There are to many elements out of wack that will build up over time. Maybe part of the old tank syndrome?
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mcarroll
10K Club member
It's hard to imagine how since tank numbers should always be tracking toward the salt mix's numbers...at least as far as water changes are concerned.
Additions of other elements through food and other avenues can be considerable - maybe more than water changes could balance out - but that seems particular to certain tanks and users....not particular to frequency of water changes.
Check out the link in post #15...a lot of these things are pretty well rationalized in that article. If you're talking about something else and I've missed it, the let me know!
-Matt
Additions of other elements through food and other avenues can be considerable - maybe more than water changes could balance out - but that seems particular to certain tanks and users....not particular to frequency of water changes.
Check out the link in post #15...a lot of these things are pretty well rationalized in that article. If you're talking about something else and I've missed it, the let me know!
-Matt
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