200 gallon tanks filter idea.

[David R]

nothing can beat overfiltering.

Wrong. Water changes trump filtration every time. Filtration is simply a bridge between water changes, just look at the discus breeders in Asia who don't even run filtration on their tanks and instead simply change ~90% of the water a couple of times a day.

You're right that you can't "over-filter" in the sense that you will be harming your fish, but once you have enough biological media to house a colony of nitrifying bacteria capable of dealing with the waste from your fish, adding more biological filtration will achieve nothing.

 

[willyb1972020]

But then you are wasting a lot of water. At that point I would rather not have fish then waste water like that. If you balance everything right can't you get away from doing water changes but once every other month? That I believe would be an ideal middle ground.

Sent from my PantechP9090 using MonsterAquariaNetwork App

 

[David R]

But then you are wasting a lot of water. At that point I would rather not have fish then waste water like that. If you balance everything right can't you get away from doing water changes but once every other month? That I believe would be an ideal middle ground.

Obviously there is a happy middle ground, I certainly couldn't do 90% changes twice daily on my tank, my heating bill would be through the roof and over summer I would run out of water in a matter of days. Once a month is probably stretching it too far IMO for most tanks, but with my set up I think I could probably get away with fortnightly changes while keeping the nitrates at an acceptable level.

The amount of filtration on the tank has very little effect on the frequency of water changes required though, unless it is either incapable of processing the waste from the fish into nitrate, or it has the means to remove nitrates from the system. That is why IMO this notion that you can't over-filter is nonsense, at least as far as biological filtration goes. If your ammonia and nitrite are reading zero anything you do to improve the biological aspect of your filtration (short of introducing nitrate removal into the equation) is moot as your parameters are already as good as they can get. The best option for extending the length between water changes is the Pothos plant, IMO. They do a great job at reducing nitrates, and although there are more to water changes than just nitrate removal they are the key indicator of how often and how much water we need to change.