The Puffer Forum

It is always better to get into the rhythm of the changes... even if it is only 10% in your case. As you said, you have a margin of error, so if it gets delayed for a few days then there is no problem.

Also if you are running CO2 it is even better to keep up the water changes to avoid a PH crash. We always get hit when we are not looking

When I first read this post I tried and failed to find a post on another forum that states the reason why water changes are more critical in high tech planted tanks than they are in low tech but here it is:

http://www.ukaps.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=10160

In particular refer to Ceg4048's comments where he states that plants that grow faster produce more organic waste hence polluting the water quicker. It stands to reason that if you're going on holiday then you can reduce your lighting, reduce your CO2 to 20ppm or below and lower your fert doses for the time that you're away.

I don't know anything about fish hormones killing and stunting fish - do the fish release the hormones when stressed or at all times?
If there is a post here that someone can refer me to I will post a question on that planted tank forum to query whether people who run low tech tanks have noticed a reduced life expectancy of their fish/inverts and report the findings back here.

Fish release hormones at all times, but especially as juveniles, and even more so as fry.

I think what RTR said was that the nitrate readings from tests we are used to using as indicators of needing to increase water changes are not actually very toxic to fish BY THEMSELVES until at much higher concentration that we think of as requiring more water changes, which is why people can be sucessful fish keepers even in areas where the local water has 30-50ish nitrates. Theoretically anything over 20 indicates a water change for puffers, were the wastes created in the tank from local biological activity. But if it's nitrates ALONE building up in the water, or going into the water with water changes, it takes a much much higher level to do the fish harm.

Nick that is correct. When I was first setting up and purchased a Nitrate removal system (vodka dosing unit) I was scolded. He asked why I would remove the only readable component in the tank.

J-P wrote:It is always better to get into the rhythm of the changes... even if it is only 10% in your case. As you said, you have a margin of error, so if it gets delayed for a few days then there is no problem.

Also if you are running CO2 it is even better to keep up the water changes to avoid a PH crash. We always get hit when we are not looking

I've always been a big fan of regular water changes. I lug buckets of RO water back from the water store each week. I don't mind because I know my fish benefit from it. Back in the 80's and early 90's, it was thought that doing water changes was bad, because changing the water would shock them, or some BS like that. I even remember aquarium shops selling their "aged" water for the benefit of the fish. Anyone remember those days? Yeah those were the dark ages.

Having said, that there is still dosing regiments where water changes are not necessary for years. http://sites.google.com/site/aquaticpla ... ps-classic

If I'm not mistaken, Diane Walstad shows how to setup low maintenance aquariums where she recommends water changes only need be done twice a year. Now obviously, a puffer is not an ideal candidate for such a system, but I read that this can be done because the tank is slightly understocked, and the plants filter the water.

As for pH crash, I don't think that would happen as long as the KH is at 3 points or higher. From the same website above, they state

"What about pH crash?
RO water just like rain water does not have any KH buffering to regulate pH. Still, do we see dead fish after rain in the nature? No. Because it is perfectly normal and fish and plants love it. The so called pH crash is a myth. It does not happen."

http://sites.google.com/site/aquaticpla ... se-osmosis

I've actually never experienced a pH crash. Can anyone here chime in and share any experience with this? Just trying to educate myself with other people's experiences and not myth and hearsay.


I Live in a Zoo, now that's news to me, plants producing organic waste. If you mean, plant leaves dropping or dying, then sure. That could happen in even a low light setup. But you're saying that because the plant is growing fast, it is in fact producing more water soluable waste (invisible to the naked eye), which then adds pollutants to the tank? I tried clicking on the link, but I have to be a member to access the forum. This just conflicts with everything I've ever learned about plants.

Nick, I've always thought that nitrates alone in high quantities were bad for fish. Stuff like stunting their growth and their lifespan. You know eating a hotdog is bad for you because of the nitrites and nitrates. Same concept, right? It's funny, because I cleaned a friend's convict cichlid tank once. (He had a new born baby. "nuff said) Anyways, before doing a WC, I tested the nitrates. It was so high, it was off the scale on my API nitrate test kit. The test color card tops out at 160 ppm!

If I'm not mistaken, Diane Walstad shows how to setup low maintenance aquariums where she recommends water changes only need be done twice a year. Now obviously, a puffer is not an ideal candidate for such a system, but I read that this can be done because the tank is slightly understocked, and the plants filter the water.

The low-tech approach. I've read that she also overfeeds to provide more waste for the plants and the lack of water changes ensures that the CO2 remains stable to combat algae.

I Live in a Zoo, now that's news to me, plants producing organic waste. If you mean, plant leaves dropping or dying, then sure. That could happen in even a low light setup. But you're saying that because the plant is growing fast, it is in fact producing more water soluable waste (invisible to the naked eye), which then adds pollutants to the tank? I tried clicking on the link, but I have to be a member to access the forum. This just conflicts with everything I've ever learned about plants.

I think that the gist of it is that if you have accelerated growth then you have accelerated waste due to plants shading out others quicker and causing leaves to die off, if you prune almost daily then maybe you can cut down on the waste produced.
I had assumed that you were dosing EI whereby the strategy is to flood the tank so that no one nutrient gets to a level where plants would begin to show defficiencies, if you can create a balance in your set-up then great but surely you would have to spend oodles of money on test kits as the rate of uptake of the various nutrients would change regularly in your CO2 enriched system?

If you have a low tech tank then everything happens slower therefore keeping on top of pruning is easier plus much of the die off will be recycled and taken in as a fertiliser would.

Certainly enough nitrates are bad for fish - what I was trying to say is that if it's nitrates alone(like if you have nitrates in your tap water) it takes way way more to do harm than if the nitrates accumulate in the tank along with other indetectable waste products.

"What about pH crash?
RO water just like rain water does not have any KH buffering to regulate pH. Still, do we see dead fish after rain in the nature? No. Because it is perfectly normal and fish and plants love it. The so called pH crash is a myth. It does not happen."

Wow, this is complete and total crap based on a red herring fallacy. Rainwater does not significantly effect the chemistry of large bodies of water because there is not enough of it. Small bodies of water are sitting directly on top of a bed of minerals in the form of soils and rocks; tiny, narrow creeks flow quickly, water moving over mineral sources quickly, while 90% of the rainwater flowing into one has seeped through mineral filled soil on the way. This is the case for almost all rainfall - you can't call rainwater "ro/di" water. If you wish to compare the two, you would have to first dig up a big shovel of local dirt, pack it into a pipe, and slowly let the ro/di drain through before the comparison.

Also, PH crash happens ALL THE TIME. Working in a LFS, people with large predatory fish, where they tended to overfeed and change far too little water, came in with PH plummeting below detectable levels regularly, usually accompanied by nitrates off the charts. This "old tank syndrome" was obviously the product of acidification and nitrate build up from way too much bioload relative to the level of water changes.

Iliveinazoo wrote: I think that the gist of it is that if you have accelerated growth then you have accelerated waste due to plants shading out others quicker and causing leaves to die off, if you prune almost daily then maybe you can cut down on the waste produced.

Okay now that make sense. I thought there was some "NEW" found chemical that fast plants were expelling that was harmful to fish. Ever see the movie, "The Happening". (hehe)

Iliveinazoo wrote: I had assumed that you were dosing EI whereby the strategy is to flood the tank so that no one nutrient gets to a level where plants would begin to show defficiencies, if you can create a balance in your set-up then great but surely you would have to spend oodles of money on test kits as the rate of uptake of the various nutrients would change regularly in your CO2 enriched system?

I am actually doing a synthesis of the Estimate Index (EI) method as well as the Perpetual Preservation System (PPS), whereby I do 50% water changes, BUT also test the water to hit target parts-per-million ranges. In the EI method, you are able to dose up to twice the amount of the target nutrients because the plants will consume some of that, then the majority of the excess nutrients will be siphoned off during a WC. No testing is really required once you get a ballpark idea of how much to dose.

In the PPS method, testing is done quite rigorously whereby you dose just enough nutrients to keep the plants healthy, which is a lot less than the EI method. However, because you constantly keep the nutrient dosing in check, it is said that water changes can be as infrequent as once every X years! I don't subscribe to this philosophy of aquarium care taking.

SOOOOOO...

I took what I liked about both methods and created my own. I dose as close to the target rate as possible and check that by testing. (e.g. nitrogen at 7 ppm, phosphates at 1.5 ppm, etc) and then do a large weekly water change. I test twice a week, once after a WC, and once during the middle of the week to give me a ball park idea of just how much to dose to hit those targets. That's not too often now, is it? The rate of uptake is for the most part pretty consistent, at least it is with my tanks, so I don't get a whole lot of variance.

I can't really adhere to the EI method because I have some really sensitive plants in my tanks, whereby if the nitrates are too high, (above 10ppm), and phosphates too low (below 1.5 ppm), the plants become stunted. http://www.aquaticplantcentral.com/foru ... t&spec=Red I love my plants almost as much as I love my fish

Nick wrote:Certainly enough nitrates are bad for fish - what I was trying to say is that if it's nitrates alone(like if you have nitrates in your tap water) it takes way way more to do harm than if the nitrates accumulate in the tank along with other indetectable waste products.

Okay, gotcha. I just always assumed that nitrates in of themselves were harmful. I don't live in an area that has any detectable nitrates in the tap water, so I never knew that such water existed. Sounds pretty bad if you ask me, but you get what you get I suppose. I always associated high nitrates as bad, period. But I do hear what you are saying.

Just out of curiosity, what are these other "undetectable waste products" that we as hobbyists can't test for, but maybe a lab could?

Nick wrote:Wow, this is complete and total crap based on a red herring fallacy. Rainwater does not significantly effect the chemistry of large bodies of water because there is not enough of it. Small bodies of water are sitting directly on top of a bed of minerals in the form of soils and rocks; tiny, narrow creeks flow quickly, water moving over mineral sources quickly, while 90% of the rainwater flowing into one has seeped through mineral filled soil on the way. This is the case for almost all rainfall - you can't call rainwater "ro/di" water. If you wish to compare the two, you would have to first dig up a big shovel of local dirt, pack it into a pipe, and slowly let the ro/di drain through before the comparison.

Also, PH crash happens ALL THE TIME. Working in a LFS, people with large predatory fish, where they tended to overfeed and change far too little water, came in with PH plummeting below detectable levels regularly, usually accompanied by nitrates off the charts. This "old tank syndrome" was obviously the product of acidification and nitrate build up from way too much bioload relative to the level of water changes.

YIKES!!!! That does sound dreadful. Not only are the fish drowning in their own crap, but then you get a pH crash on top of that. Well I suspected that line of thinking to be a bunch of BS. But since I've never experienced a pH crash before, nor have I ever heard of any first hand experience from anyone else having suffered from it, I just assumed it was a myth like the website states. Thanks for chiming in with your experience.

PH crash can certainly be avoided by supplementing carbonates, as I believe these perpetual system tanks advise. That is why their tanks do not have a PH crash - they have you test for these substances and supplement them separately - they will buffer the water as well as be utilized by plants. Why they did not simply state that, I don't know. Personally, I find "we understand why that occurs and this system works to prevent it using the same supplements you test for and feed your plants." inspires much more confidence than "That's just a myth, if you've seen it, you must be wrong."

Other undetectable wastes that accumulate along with nitrates include: Any and all non-nitrogenous end products of fat and carbohydrate metabolism in the system, fish hormones, everything in your fish's slime coat, and everything in the food that isn't any of the above. Certainly other things as well in the case of many tanks.

genetao i have no advice to offer but i would like to see a flick of the tank as its kind of the tank im thinking of doing (planted w/ dwarf puffer).

I raised discus for a long time- 10+years - in hard water changed once every 2 weeks. They bred, but the eggs weren't viable (hard water). I can't do reverse osmosis because it is a VERY bad idea to do so if you are on septic tanks (huge waste of water and strain on them). I had Wattley discus at some points, not some mutant LFS garbage. Anyway sure they do better in pristine water but don't be discouraged from keeping them if you can't do daily water changes. Give them a very varied diet (OSI discus is the best staple I have found supplemented with -of all things- WARDLEY's Spiruline. Normally I find Wardleys stuff garbage.

I didn't read through all of the posts here, just the first page... I just had to give kudos to Flutter for the 'clothing' analogy. I like that.


+1,000

FranktheTank wrote:I raised discus for a long time- 10+years - in hard water changed once every 2 weeks. They bred, but the eggs weren't viable (hard water). I can't do reverse osmosis because it is a VERY bad idea to do so if you are on septic tanks (huge waste of water and strain on them). I had Wattley discus at some points, not some mutant LFS garbage. Anyway sure they do better in pristine water but don't be discouraged from keeping them if you can't do daily water changes. Give them a very varied diet (OSI discus is the best staple I have found supplemented with -of all things- WARDLEY's Spiruline. Normally I find Wardleys stuff garbage.

I have really no idea how an RO system works ... why would it be a burden on a septic system? I am also on well water and if I bi-pass the softener, the plants do amazingly well.

There's a lot of waste with RO water. I don't fully understand how it works but I know the unit we had in the lab had a tube going to a holding container and a tube going to the sink. I'm not even sure if the flow was equal or if more went to the sink