Reduce water changes! REDUCE WATER CONSUMPTION!<span class="smallfont"> <b>(2 Viewing

[rcarbonell]

BTW.. I hope to keep my electrical and water consumption to a minimum, conserve energy and stuff...

 

[aropal]

This is one of those thought provoking questions (at least for me). We are going through a very dry period in my area. The rivers are barely flowing. I feel a bit guilty using 120+ gallons of fresh water every week for water changes. .

Interestingly enough you have greater rainfall where you live than I do in the UK. The only difference is my rainfall is rather more evenly distributed throughout the year. If you live in a relatively arid area at least some of the year you can do what most of the population DON’T do and attempt to conserve water in other areas. With a little work such as lower flush toilets, less frequent car washing. Not running the tap when shaving/ teeth cleaning etc you can drop your water usage to the same levels as those people who don’t have aquaria.

Is there something I can do to my "used water" to remove the nitrates and other impurities and be able to use it in a week for my next water change? It has to be something relatively inexpensive and not require a lot of work.

The best thing you can do with waste aquarium water is put it on your garden, it’s great for your plants. I guess you could use it to flush toilets as well but you’d be looking at a rather more significant outlay of cash to provide such a system.

 

[pacu mom]

tnx! how often then do you do water changes?

Green water can be caused by high nitrates and/or excessive light. Because of skylights and large picture windows in our living room, our tank is in sunlight most of the day. Without the UV sterilizer, we could change out the equivalent of 100% of the water everyday and still have green water. We do water changes to keep the nitrates below 20 ppm. We have two large pacu 20"+ and two large oscars. Our tank is overstocked by most people's estimation. We have extreme mechanical filtration where feces and debris are quickly removed from the tank. To keep the nitrates < 20ppm, we do 60% water changes on two consecutive days....So, we change out at least 400 gallons of water every week on our 300 gallon tank. Because of the way our tank is plumbed, water changes are very easy and involve opening and closing valves and turning one faucet on and off. We only change out 200 gallons at a time, because we run out of hot water! There is no water conservation at our house. Our commitment is to provide a safe and healthy environment for our fish. Until such a time that we get a much larger tank, we are going to have to change out a lot of water to keep the nitrates below 20 ppm (ammonia and nitrite are always 0)

I think you are really overstocked. I hope you realize that red-bellied pacu can get up to 36" and black pacu can get to 48"+ Oscars are also extremely messy fish. As your pacu and oscars grow, you will have a hard time keeping the nitrates low. BTW, you have a beautiful pond

 

[rcarbonell]

Tnx!

By the looks of it, my pond is still large enough for the fishy's.. All the fishes are usually "hanging out" by the 7' glass.. the remaining 18 feet length of the pond are usally some free swimming space..

Im planning to put an additional overhead filter maybe about 10 gals with another UV clarifier/sterilizer on the left side of the pond...

Pacu are like a $1 ea here so the one's that grow extremely large will get cooked..
I have a much larger fishery pond about 2000gal which use to house tilapia.. The tilapia are gone now so where thinking of putting 20pacu's there..


they say pacu's taste great with onion and tomatoes..

 

[Wolf3101]

I test my water regularly and I let the Nitrate level and the TDS (total desolved solids) reading be my guide on when to change water and how much....although I usually only do a 25% change at any one time...if the TDS reading is bad enough I'll bump that up to a third. This uses far less water than just blindly changing over half the tank or pond water once a week or even more often in some cases.

 

[pacu mom]

I test my water regularly and I let the Nitrate level and the TDS (total desolved solids) reading be my guide on when to change water and how much....although I usually only do a 25% change at any one time...if the TDS reading is bad enough I'll bump that up to a third. This uses far less water than just blindly changing over half the tank or pond water once a week or even more often in some cases.

I kept meticulous records of all the test results, before and after water changes for the first 15 months. By doing massive water changes, we can go 6 or 7 days before the nitrate creeps up to 20 ppm. Things get hectic for us, and it's easier to do large changes than to do smaller midweek changes. My understanding is that you cannot have a nitrate reading that is too low. As far as water conservation goes, our water comes from a system getting water from the river seen running through our property. The river just flows into the Pacific Ocean, so water conservation is not an issue for us.

 

[Wolf3101]

Should something get into the water supply...even if it's a rare occurance....large scale water changes will only accelerate the potential damage. A TDS test takes all of 20 secounds. Even when the other peramitors show good to perfect the TDS changes a great deal and is a better guage to determine how much stuff is in the water. I test the water coming INTO our RO/DI system continuiously just as I do that coming out. It can vary from 380 to 490. The fda conciders 500 to be the limit for safe drinking water. I change my tank water when it creeps above 300. basicly the water coming OUT of our tanks at a water change is cleaner than our tap water.