Is there a Maximum amount of water changes one should do on an auto water change system? 🤔💧🐟

[Arty Mars]

Hello everyone, 

So i've essentially got an infinite amount of H2O at my disposal now that i've automated all my water changes using carbon block water filters and overflows. I'm wondering wether there's a limit for how much you can change the water before it will affect the bacteria or fish? 

Is 200% a week overkill when you're heavily feeding and the water being changed "gradually throughout the week" is pretreated, heated and oxygenated etc?

I want to be able to over feed bucket loads of brine shrimp and not worry about clouding or ammonia spikes by doing 20-30% water changes on a drip system throughout the day. In an ideal world i'd have a drip system to feed live brine shrimp every 2 hours as-well but that's a problem for some other high-tech automation Nerm to work out 😅  

I've successfully drilled all 20 of my Grow Out and Conditioning Tanks with 1/4 inch holes for attaching quick connect pipes and irrigation tube for draining water.

Now drilling a few more for auto water top-offs and extra drainage on bigger tanks "it's painfully slow but doesn't really need to be much wider pipe with a drip system".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everything seems to be going smooth so far, for now i'm manually topping off the tanks every other day and they drain themselves to about an inch or two from the rim of the tank. 🤞🏻😅



I've also discovered adding a length of tube to an elbow or T-Fitting will bell siphon the tank to as low as you want and then you can fill to just under the outlet hole until you're ready to do another water change, top it off and let it siphon back down again! 😄

I use tap water filtered with carbon then catalytic carbon blocks (which filters out the chlorine + chloramines that I've discovered Melbourne Water has a small amount of in Australia)

Now the plan is to set up a water pump on a solenoid to automatically fill the tanks each day through the inlet hole with a couple gallons of treated water from a big water drum hidden upstairs in the pantry haha (and auto dosing a dash of prime into the drum every other day to combat the excess ammonia that is generated when you filter out chloramines with carbon) Or perhaps I could be using Purigen or some other ammonia sucking resin for that 🤔 

The third hole is going to be plugged or just extra drainage for now, but at some point I might use it for mixing RO water into specific tanks with fish that like super soft water or to trick Corydoras into breeding i've heard haha 🤣 

Perhaps it can be my Brine Shrimp Dispensing Inlet when someone invents a live Brine Shrimp Generator hahaha 

Edited November 21, 2021 by Arty Mars
Images weren't alligned properly

[gardenman]

If the water is available and free and you can get rid of excess water without trouble (often the biggest issue) then no amount of water change is too much. Dan of Dan's Fish Room is building his new facility adjacent to a stream and the stream will more or less run through his fish room essentially doing a 100% water change constantly. Assuming the water coming in is clean and pure, a big assumption, you don't need any filtration at all with such a setup.

Some of the commercial aquariums in coastal locations just pump sea water through their display tanks after filtering it on the way into the aquarium. I think the Aquarium of the Pacific does that. I remember watching a video where they have this pipe cleaning thing they shoot through the intake pipes to remove accumulated sea life.

I've toyed with an auto water change system here, but I have septic tanks and no good way to dispose of excess water and the idea of adding 20,000 gallons of unnecessary water to the septic system never strikes me as a good idea. The amount of water that accumulates with even a 0.5 gallon per hour drip system can be daunting. A half-gallon per hour is twelve gallons per day. That's 4,380 gallons per year, per tank. Five tanks at 4,380 gallons per tank is 21,900 gallons per year. Yikes! It's like adding two or three extra bathrooms to your septic system. If it's not designed to handle it, you'll have problems.

[Gator]

@Arty Mars; In the wild, our fish receive a 100% water change every second of their lives, but that water is of the same temp and pH as the water before it was. If you do a large water change every day, there shouldn't be any issues as long as you replace the water slowly, as they're used to in the wild, even during the monsoons.

@gardenman; You must live in the country and that's fine. You can take your used water after a water change and pour it on your lawn or garden, used aquarium water makes a great fertilizer.