The Puffer Forum

It is not true to say that you either have to go 'high tech' or 'Walstad'.
Why can't you have a bog standard planted or non-planted tank with regular water changes?

S'what I've got. Bog standard tank, 2 decent filters on it, and I do partials every single day, without fail. Takes 5 minutes to hoover out 2 buckets and replace with 2 clean, 10 minutes if you include the weekly filters rinse, and all the lovely nutritious waste water goes on my garden and in the watering cans for the houseplants. I'm not interested in anything other than giving my puff the best quality of life I can.

And the bloody garden is like a jungle now

Stratters wrote:S'what I've got. Bog standard tank, 2 decent filters on it, and I do partials every single day, without fail. Takes 5 minutes to hoover out 2 buckets and replace with 2 clean, 10 minutes if you include the weekly filters rinse, and all the lovely nutritious waste water goes on my garden and in the watering cans for the houseplants. I'm not interested in anything other than giving my puff the best quality of life I can.

And the bloody garden is like a jungle now

Yeah, sure, but there is more than the water change to the "Walstad" method. Most of it is the soil choice...It has worked for me, till now, so I am happy. I am not strict Walstad either, I have (very small) partials, a canister slightly larger that it should be for my tank, and more light too. But the rest is Walstad (soil, floating and emergent plants, hard water,...)
Regarding the water change, look at whats started the whole discussion: changing water is not necessarily as easy as filling up a bucket, wait for a day or two for the chlorine to get away (or treat it), then do a partial with it...It really depend on what you get out of your tab... in my case, my water test show that doing that will increase the amount of nitrates in my tank :/ So you may need more complex water preparation, if you live in a agricultural region, you may be surprised about how much nitrate is in your (drinkable) tab water. Here in Europe it is ok if it is under 50 mg/l...I have about 30 mg out of the tab (and it's not a surprise, my water provider says so, I will not be the next Erin Brockovich for checking this...)

I have tested only nitrate, so can't say anything about heavy metals . That, and trying to keep mineralisation stable, is why I do small partials.

But let's indeed agree to disagree, I have shown my test, given my interpretation of it, and will report in case of tank crash or strange health problems...After that, everybody will manage his own tank as he like

PS: By the way, even with nitrate, heavy metals and other stuff like pesticides present in the tab water, I still drink it every day. Not bothered by this, we had nastier stuff in the past without awful health problem. Only thing I am really uncomfortable with is hormonal-like compounds, especially oestrogen. This one is relatively new, and nasty because sneaky....for humans, I mean. For tanks, I wonder if breeding is not affected...

PPS: Well, this thread has badly drifted, so.....Tenacious, are you still here and progressing with your irrubesco community?

Stratters wrote:S'what I've got. Bog standard tank, 2 decent filters on it, and I do partials every single day, without fail. Takes 5 minutes to hoover out 2 buckets and replace with 2 clean, 10 minutes if you include the weekly filters rinse, and all the lovely nutritious waste water goes on my garden and in the watering cans for the houseplants. I'm not interested in anything other than giving my puff the best quality of life I can.

And the bloody garden is like a jungle now

This is my method, lots of small attention equals a healthy tank. I can go a little overboard though and won't think twice about changing lots of water on each tank daily or every other day. My garden also is thriving lol

In the USA, high nitrate water (at or above 30ppm) is not allowed in public water supplies. Heavy metals also have specific limits, and more of those decreasing in allowed levels as well. Agricultural areas do tend to worst ground water supplies in general, but downwind or downstream from heavy industry may be problematic as well. There are lots of areas where residents who can afford it never drink tap water, but rely on safer bottled water delivery or have in-house water purification systems for drinking water.

My basic issues w/Ms. Walstad's techniques are that she tries to gloss over the fact that her tank practices produce similar microflora as do standard biofiltered tanks (i.e. similar or identical biofiltration bacteria are present in both filter-less and filtered tanks (i.e., bacteria to oxidize ammonia to nitrite, and bacteria which oxidize nitrite to nitrate). In her tank style, those bugs are just diseminated randomly, whereever they can gain and hold a place to attach and live. If they were not present, their products would not be present and everyone is well aware that her tanks do have nitrate in levels greater than the source water provides. Plants are great "fixers" of nutrients, including nitrate, but in tanks without current their always fairly low efficiency at nutrient fixation efficiency is pathetic. Current adds to their efficiency remarkably. There is also the seldom- discussed fact that plants produce and provide dissolved oxygen only while they are actively photosynthesizing, and this generally a bit less than their total lighted period. During the tank's "dark" cycle, the plants require dissolved O2 from the water. If the tank is at all stocked with animal life, this can certainly be at least a source of stress or worse. Few hobbyists use veggie filters as I do for dark-cycle oxygenation, and many hobbyists overstock their tanks. So she at least allows some current now, but does not allow any mulm/debris collection to capture it for removal. I simply do not and cannot understand that. It is counter-intuitive. If I use x watts to move water around in a tank, why should I not simultaneously remove excess nutrients? Please do not try to argue for a "balanced aquarium" There is not now and never has been any such thing, and there is not likely ever to be such. We add food and light and make-up water regularly and at least. Ergo we must also remove things or the system will degenerate and decay. Entropy is always with us, we call it Old Tank Syndrome in the hobby.

There are many who never test. (Is it that "what you don't know can't hurt you?" It can, you know.) I cannot quite grasp that. Home hobby test kits cannot identify and measure dissolved organic waste. So we use nitrate accumulation as a measure in unplanted tanks, because we can test that. But in fact in heavily planted tanks, organic waste accumulation should and generally does exceed the rate of nitrate accumulation in unplanted tanks, just because the plants themselves use (absorb and utilize) nitrate, so we lose the effect of that measure. Only SW FOWLR (marine fish only w/live rock) plus a good skimmer can handle the organic waste build up in tanks. In fresh water or brackish water we must use other techniques, generally what most hobbyists consider large-scale water changes ~ 50% weekly. And to many hobbyists think that the 50% can be done even by dividing that 50% into multiple small changes, with the total adding up to 50%. They apparently did not do well in math in school. They missed the concept that seven each seven+ percent changes do not equal one 50% water change, not by a wide margin. And if they decline to test, they are unlikely to ever catch on. Their tank is on the way to OTS, old tank syndrome.

HTH

Well, I agree with most of your points, and I think Ms Walstad do too, to an extant.
She certainly advise water movement now, and probably even in her first version (at least for typical largish tanks). First she did promote water pumps for that, but now went canister (probably thinking that an extra amount of water and a nice place for bacterial colonisation will not hurt. It may make azote less easily available to plants (it seems they prefer amonium and nitrite, which remove or diminish the reduction needed to synthetise proteins), qhe feel nitrifying bacterias and plants compete for the easy to get azote (amoniac and nitrites). Well, that's true for tank containing plants only, but as soon as you want some animals, I prefer to have a double team taking care of the more toxic nitrite/amoniac (plants and bacteria) even if it reduce a little bit plant growth...She probably reached this conclusion too, hence the move from water pumps to canisters.

The nitrate level regulation are less stringent in Europe (it's 50 mg/l), so I confirm: i am at 30 mg out of my tab, your legal limit, and I may exceed it soon. Well, in Korea I ate some spice (now forbidden if I am well informed) which probably contained pure nitrate (it tasted like gun powder) and many of our dry sausages contain nitrite here in Europe....In both case I liked it, so I will suffer all possible problem for this anyway, even without the water

For the need to remove something for the tank to avoid accumulation, of course I agree. Elements do not vanish, just eventually transforms....Ms Walstad do agree to mass conservation too, her removal is in the form of plant trimming instead of partial and vacuuming. I do that (plant trimming), but as I said i'm no pure Walstad, I also have small partial (just much less than what is commonly advised - for good reason in unplanted tank, but imho not necessary for well planted tanks) and sometimes vaccum some mulm too, just because it does not look good Not that I have a lot visible, I think it is decomposed quite quickly by bacteria and microfauna into something that percolate in the soil, hence the open cycle exernal food -> fish -> excrements -> mulm -> soil -> plants -> trimmed plants in the trash... No idea if this work very long term, only thing I can tell is that it works for me (for about 2 years) and for others (typically around 5 years). More than that is very difficult to get, just because few people keep a tank running undisturbed for 10+ years, or do not document it....Seems also that there is a notable denitrification happening in anaerobic zones, both in the canister and in the soil, reducing nitrate to azote which will escape....

Well, not having access to full lab (and the water test kits available are imho expensive and suited more to tank start and crude monitoring, more than predicting tank crash - for that you would need to monitor your soil too, something that is not an easy or cheap task, especially with a Walstad soil), I have to rely on my very unscientific (by lack of instrumentation) observations and to experiments by others. That's why I liked Ms Walstad book, she has a very scientific-oriented approach....Thinking of it, I am a little bit surprised you do not like it, given your background. You may have different recommendation or conclusions, but her investigation methods should please you...

I don't do a 50% in my FW, I do 10% every day, and I test weekly, every Saturday morning, before I do the WC and filter sluicing. I don't change my media either - had a bit of a heated debate with the LnotsogoodFS over that one.

Should I be doing a big water change every week, too? I live in horror of a tank crash.

Stratters wrote:I don't do a 50% in my FW, I do 10% every day, and I test weekly, every Saturday morning, before I do the WC and filter sluicing. I don't change my media either - had a bit of a heated debate with the LnotsogoodFS over that one.

Should I be doing a big water change every week, too? I live in horror of a tank crash.

Let's say u have a production of p mg/l of polutant per day, and you do c% water change every d day (with a water containing x0 mg/l of polutant), you will reach an equilibrium of x mg/l polutant just before the change (i.e. max polution), with
x*T*c/100 (polutant removed) = p*d*T (polutant generated in your tank)+x0*T*c/100 (polutant introduced by the "clean" water)...T is the volume of your tank. So it gives x=x0+100*p*(d/c)....so no, basicaly, for polution generated at constant rate per liter and a constant tank volume (i.e. no evaporation, or evaporation compensated by completely demineralised water with 0 polutant), you will reach exactly the same amount of max polution if you do 10% every day, 20% every 2 days, 30% every 3 day, ... well, you get the picture.
What will change is the min polution, just after the water change....It will be lower if you do big water changes, but this is not good imho, it means you have bigger swing in your tank, i.e. it is less stable. So you do it good, no worry...

BTW, for me water change means you remove c% of the water in your tank, the level drop (quite dramatically for a 50% change) then you refill it with new water. No removing a little bit of water, filling a little bit from your fresh bucket, taking a little bit again, .... so that your level never drop a lot and your bucket is finaly empty. If you do that, the math will be different (more complex, I can do it but it will involve exponentials and not sure all will appreciate the stuff lol), and then 10% every day will probably not give the same max pollution than 20% every 2 days...Anyway, it will be less efficient that the first way I described, i.e. you will end up with more pollution than if you do the change in one go. That's what RTR meant when telling "they think doing 10% 5 times is the same as 50%", I think, and he is perfectly correct.

Thanks!

And that makes sense, and is what I do; I siphon off 2x 12l buckets from the (210l) tank, then replace it with 2x buckets of fresh water. The water never tests anything but 0 for all but nitrates, and they test at 5ppm (from the top of my head, it's the lowest figure on my API test kit anyway) prior to the water changes.

If your tests are reading fine then you are ok. You need not do a weekly change ontop, if you notice that your readings are slightly slipping ( as fish grow etc) add an extra bucket every/every other day. I love lots of short and sweet maintenance but do get a little carried away sometimes

I think we are having communication failures, some perhaps due to language/translations issues. For example, gkai wrote: "Elements do not vanish, just eventually transforms...." That is. in English, a very misleading statement. Elements (hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, potassium, etc.) "transform" only in solar masses and other specialized locations of very high energy flux. This very definitely does not occur glass boxes of water with fish and plants. I think that "react" or some such was the real intent. But it certainly does hinder understanding and successful communication.

Nitrate is commonly employed as a preservative in certain foods, and that usage and its concentration may be controversial. But that too is not at issue here.

What is at issue is in part the redox state of nitrogen present in ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate. Gaseous ammonia and dissolved ammonia gas are both highly toxic to bony fish and mammals. (We are not discussing cartilaginous fish here, their metabolism is quite different.). Ammonium ion is generally orders of magnitude less toxic than ammonia gas, to the point that for tank purposes, we can consider it non-toxic. Ammonia gas is so strongly hydroscopic that in hobby tanks it should always appear as ammonium hydroxide, but it can adversely affect the pH of the tank to the detriment of the fish. So in low concentration, dissolved ammonia gas "neutralizes" itself. Most hobby test kits cannot however distinguish between dissolved ammonia gas and ammonium ion. Those which can and do distinguish the two are IME much less user-friendly and use a lab protocol which is unfamiliar to most hobbyist who are not laboratory-adept.

Nitrite is difficult for most bony fish and mammals to handle.

Thus, advocating environments favoring ammonium or nitrite is in effect shooting yourself in the foot, and is FWIW, not at all easy to do long-term. That is what we defeat by fishlessly cycling a tank and/or filter. We do that to avoid gill epithelium burning by dissolved ammonia. While new growth of some new gill epithelium is possible and does occur, it well never match the functionality it had before the ammonia burns occurred.

Fully oxidized nitrogen is the normal and least toxic nitrogen form for a fish tank. All mature tanks show this nitrogen form. Additionally, aquatic plants have no issues using this form.

Marine tanks which are FOWLR can have full denitrification to dissolved N2 gas from LR, but we cannot measure that dissolved N2 gas by hobby kits SFAIK (so far as I know). That anaerobic process is limited to FOWLR, DSB (deep sand beds) and possibly some plenum tanks. Those last two specialized forms may denitrify to N2 gas as well, in BW and FW, but no real data is available there SFASIK. The depth of the plenum substrate bed along with the particle size would be determining factors. I doubt that planted FW plenums could denitrify well, but I have no data to confirm or refute that.

Yes, sorry for my choice of word, it was a little bit imprecise. It is a mix of language problem, lazyness and rusted chemistry. I love sciences, but chemistry is not my prefered one nor my professional expertise. I am not really in technical mode here, thinking it may be boring for those without a scientific background....But don't be afraid, you will not spot first principle violation from me lol.
IIRC, denitrification is more prevalent than what you mention. Walstad have done some experiments on this too, using a simple balance (Azote in as food, Azote out as plant trimming, animal growth and nitrate in the water, during a year iirc.) The accuracy was poor, especially as soil is difficult to monitor....but enough to see that significant azote was missing...so it must have escaped as simple gas N2). Confirmed by examination of filter medium: it seems that a biofilm apear mixing both nitrifying and denitrifying bacterias, and this makes sense, there is a niche available for bacteria using nitrate instead of oxygen, even if it less efficient, as soon as oxygen is less available...I think I saw that on her website, or posted in El natural section of APT....But I am not sure.

Well, as I said already this thread is interresting but drift badly from the "Puffer Community" of Tenacious...Maybe this should be moved in Freshwater tank section under a Walstad thread, or Azote thread, or????