I elected to do my first ever water change on my 90 this afternoon. I planned to do one a while back, but life got a bit crazy. Anyway, since I was changing water, I thought I’d run some tests for kicks.
pH: 8.1 (thought it would be much lower)
Amm: 0 (no suprise)
nitrite: 0 (no suprise)
nitrate: 40 ppm!
40? Can that be right? I don’t have a skimmer, no fuge, and my stock list includes a five inch tang, five inch maroon clown, five inch trigger, and a three inch parrotfish. I was honestly expecting triple digits.
Could possibly be right. What type of test kit? It has been said on this forum, and others, many times that 0ppm Nitrate on most hobby test kits doesn’t mean you have don’t have 20+ppm. I also HIGHLY doubt if you are using a chemical pH test kit that your results are accurate there.
Tim you’re missing a lot of things here. He doesn’t care about keeping things in a natural range. He keeps a FOWLR system mostly. His tank has been set up a long time now. He expected pH to be low because he expected his overall chemistry to be off and his water to be more acidic due to extra waste.
Joe perhaps you could include a little more background for those of us who can’t remember your set up and details.
[quote=“TimH07, post:3, topic:2966”]
There is no real reason to run an ammonia or nitrite test[/quote]
If Joe was actually considering doing a water change it is possible things didn’t look right and wouldn’t hurt to do a test a full to see what was going on.
Joe I realize you have strong opinions about your tanks and how you do things and also realize it is likely you value my opinion very little.(Which is fine) If you were to ask me I would say things might be touchy if you start to mess with things at this point. It is inevitable you are going to run into problems if you go without water changes for a lengthy period of time. There is a big chance you’ll see significant increases in the whole Nitrogen cycle if you start to do water changes.(which might not make sense at first, but there are reasons.) Lots of people say they had no problems with their tank when they weren’t messing with it or trying to fix things and when they started to correct things that is when things went wrong. Well actually things went wrong a long time ago and the tank had been a ticking time bomb for a long time. The animals adapt to the conditions in the tank and even rapid significant changes for the better can have negative results. I’d suggest for starters only doing a smaller water change to begin with.
Thanks Jon, I did approximately 20 gallons in the water change, total system is around 120g. I have had the tank up since July 17th, this was the first water change. I don’t run a skimmer, and the only filtration is about 90 lbs of live rock and a bunch of aiptasia/majano anemones. I only changed water today because I was mixing for the octopus. It did clear the water up nicely, it had started to yellow a bit. How much of an impact do you think the anemones have on nitrates? Maybe that’s why they were not off the charts?
If the anemones have been growing significantly it is very possible they have used up a large amount of nutrients which would have otherwise resulted in Nitrates in the water column showing up in the tests. There was once a guy who purposed using aptasia as a filtration media. Unless you harvest the aptaisa, removing them from the system, this can not last forever. It can trap and bind the nutrients in its tissue if the anemones are increasing in size or number, but it cannot destroy Nitrate molecules. The food you add to the tank has to go somewhere. If you never remove macro or micro algae, or do water changes the nutrients will continue to build in the system and eventually a stable aquarium will be impossible to keep.
The only individual I know that went without doing water changes for a significant time successfully had a very low bioload, a MASSIVE system, fed his tangs macro grown in the same system, and was a marine chemist who could check and dose things like strontium and iodine which most hobbyist would ignore.