All right well I was playing around with a piece of paper and a pen tonight, and I think I've figured out a pretty good way to figure out how to stock your tanks and gauge when you should be doing water changes. There are problems with what I've come up with (as always) but I think it is a better indicator than length or even volume of the fish. The big problem though is that it would be dependent on data provided by other aquarists, but I'll bring that up later.
Anyways, I started off by just jotting down different water change schedules and how much water you are actually changing. Such as, two 50% water changes a week on a 50 gallon tank would be 50 gallons of water being changed. In other words, you are disposing of 50 gallons of spoiled water.
After getting that on paper, I thought about the effects of getting rid of that water. Say your tank was at 20ppm nitrates, getting rid of 50% of that water will bring you down to 10ppm. Likewise, removing 100% of the water will get you to 0ppm nitrates, and so on and so forth. So, how does this apply to stocking levels and actual water changes?
I devised a way to gauge waste output per gallon per day for a given fish, this is how you would do it:
Say a large oscar puts out 10ppm of waste per day in a 50 gallon tank, you know this by measuring. Waste dilution is dependent upon tank size, have a tank twice as big? You will have half the waste per gallon. According to that, to get the waste per gallon you will multiply 10x50, which gives us 500ppm of waste per day in a 1 gallon tank.
We can now use that number as a constant and apply it to this equation:
__ppm/__gallons
That will let you know how many ppm the nitrates will rise per day, for a given tank size. So according to my theory, if you were to put that oscar into a 120 gallon tank, the nitrates would rise about 4ppm per day. Make sense? The problem is you would have to find someone with a single specimie who would be willing to measure the nitrates for a few days, at the same time, and then build a database for all the fishes. I don't think it would be too hard to do that though with websites like this.
Anyways, when it comes time to stock your tank, you can use these numbers to help you decide which fish to keep in your tank. So for that 120 gallon tank, say you want to keep the nitrates below 20ppm utilizing 50% water changes (a 50% water change will take you from 20ppm to 10ppm) you would have to do a water change about once every two days. "That's too much work!! That oscar will not work in my tank."
REMEMBER, THE NUMBER IS FICTITIOUS. It's a little too complicated I think for a beginning aquarist, most people are too lazy to do all that. But for us who are contimplating larger stocks and whatnot, it's a good way to gauge whether adding the fish will provide us with too much work, or if it would be downright impossible.
Does that make sense to you guys?
Anyways, I started off by just jotting down different water change schedules and how much water you are actually changing. Such as, two 50% water changes a week on a 50 gallon tank would be 50 gallons of water being changed. In other words, you are disposing of 50 gallons of spoiled water.
After getting that on paper, I thought about the effects of getting rid of that water. Say your tank was at 20ppm nitrates, getting rid of 50% of that water will bring you down to 10ppm. Likewise, removing 100% of the water will get you to 0ppm nitrates, and so on and so forth. So, how does this apply to stocking levels and actual water changes?
I devised a way to gauge waste output per gallon per day for a given fish, this is how you would do it:
Say a large oscar puts out 10ppm of waste per day in a 50 gallon tank, you know this by measuring. Waste dilution is dependent upon tank size, have a tank twice as big? You will have half the waste per gallon. According to that, to get the waste per gallon you will multiply 10x50, which gives us 500ppm of waste per day in a 1 gallon tank.
We can now use that number as a constant and apply it to this equation:
__ppm/__gallons
That will let you know how many ppm the nitrates will rise per day, for a given tank size. So according to my theory, if you were to put that oscar into a 120 gallon tank, the nitrates would rise about 4ppm per day. Make sense? The problem is you would have to find someone with a single specimie who would be willing to measure the nitrates for a few days, at the same time, and then build a database for all the fishes. I don't think it would be too hard to do that though with websites like this.
Anyways, when it comes time to stock your tank, you can use these numbers to help you decide which fish to keep in your tank. So for that 120 gallon tank, say you want to keep the nitrates below 20ppm utilizing 50% water changes (a 50% water change will take you from 20ppm to 10ppm) you would have to do a water change about once every two days. "That's too much work!! That oscar will not work in my tank."
REMEMBER, THE NUMBER IS FICTITIOUS. It's a little too complicated I think for a beginning aquarist, most people are too lazy to do all that. But for us who are contimplating larger stocks and whatnot, it's a good way to gauge whether adding the fish will provide us with too much work, or if it would be downright impossible.
Does that make sense to you guys?
