Reef nutrition

No water charges?

I ran it for about 9 months on a 75g with a canister filter. Shoot, I only cleaned my filter once a month or 2 during this time. It worked, but everything seemed to slow down in growth and I had to feed less. Once I went back to weekly 8% water changes, everything took off again. It can be successful, but might slow growth, at least for then the coral are getting use to it. You'll never know how it affects your system until you try though
 
I know a lot of people are successful with the Reef Moonshiner's method that doesn't require water changes.
 
I think you should always do some water changes. If you’re hands are in your tank, you can be introducing small amounts of pollutants, like soaps, detergents, oils, etc
 
Water charges? One time years ago I felt a tingling when I put my hand in the tank when a wire was breaking. It was unpleasant. I don’t do it on a regular basis.

For water changes, I tried the Triton method a few years ago. No water changes, good additives, ICP testing. Made sense to me. Problem was that many of the times I’d do their ICP test the results interpretation they give told me to do several water changes, after having not done them. So basically my no water change method was still doing water changes. Now I do changes once or twice a month. I still like the Triton Core7 additives and ICP tests, but I don’t try to go without the regular water changes.
 
Eh. Yea. No water changes for softies and some lps. Super easy stuff. It can be done.
Here’s the catch tho. Once you move into a little more difficult and corals that require cleaner water. You’re gonna be in trouble.
Every 5-10 years you’ll find treads. They are all the same basically with a few twists. It’s manipulating your water. But you’re gonna pay for it in additives.
Erin @Kensington Reefer. Once told me in a slight moment of clearly that he had. Of course he doesn’t remember it. But I do. Water changes have positive ions. Dirty water has negative ion. You need to remove the negative for the positive cuz at some point. There will be too many negatives. Then he went back to being Erin. Dunno what happened. I was like Daymn. Knowledge.
 
I know a lot of people are successful with the Reef Moonshiner's method that doesn't require water changes.
Are they integrating the DOC tests yet? I know that was something that Salem has been talking about a lot as something you can't directly affect without water changes and/or ozone.

But people have success either way, the biggest thing is if you're using it as a way to justify lazy reefer syndrome, in which you'll be destined to fail just by a lack of observation and interaction with the tank. People that have eyes glued to their tanks seem to have success with whatever method they use.
 
I was doing once a week, noticed faster sps coral growth, but poor color in sps, now I recently switched to every 2 weeks slightly slower sps growth but color is improving. Small non scientific experiment on my part. I'm Trying to find the happy medium yet anything odd happens will go back to weekly without hesitation.

In my zoa and leather tank i change the water in it with water taken out from my other two tanks after their water changes probably every other month.

So in short i cycle new water into my main tank, use the removed water in my hammer tank, take hammer tank water and use it in zoa tank. After zoa tank it's discarded. So far process hasn't hurt anything but keeping a close eye on things.

My hammer tank has the best skimmer so water taken from it is probably cleaner than the water in my main tank.

Some people on videos claim to make no water change work, often as someone else mentioned the desire is justified from being lazy in tank maintenance and not form a environmental save the world type concern.

Some people on similar vidoes say tap water works. Neither of these however are mainstream practices in the hobby. While they may appear to work for them it's less than likey to work for most people.
 
I like the analogy
Think of a fart in an elevator

And adhere to
The solution to pollution is dilution
Lots of food in
Large n frequent water changes
New water is “ideal”

Also
@Turkeysammich
You’ve “reminded” me, but I still don’t recall that specific “ions”
But water changes DO remove undesirable ions, and REPLENISH the ions needed for growth

Best fishes and happy reefing
 
My 168, and 300 both are/were minimal changes with full dosing. I like going with wet skimming out some water and replacing with fresh salt water.

My 30 softie system needs almost no new water.
 
Water changes are essential for a successful tank IMO. The frequency is debatable. I do 10%+ weekly.

The objective is to remove unwanted stuff. Nothing more, nothing less.

Not doing them works perfectly fine until it does not.
 
Back
Top