Daily Water Changes?

[Dave]

Curious if anyone has tried performing daily water changes? My thought process is the following: I see keepers that talk about daily testing and dosing calc and alk. I see keepers talking about dosing trace elements...dosing carbon for a ULN system...etc...etc... I guess I am just questioning if it would be just as ...or more economical to do daily water changes...and if you are daily testing and dosing...if replaced with water changes...would it be more time consuming? Finally it would seem to be far simpler and safer than some of the dosing options reefers take to get a healthy tank (no judgements attached)...Just throwing the idea out there. Thoughts?


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[redfishbluefish]

I like your thinking. I've kicked around the idea of automating my water changes, but haven't committed because of lack of water supply and waste dumping close by. My interest was solely convenience. Note that you can't maintain alk and calc by water changes alone in an established tank unless those water changes were enormous.

 

[Trio91]

I definitely would have it automated as i cant see it being worth the effort of doing daily manual WC's. I've read threads where folks use an aqua lifter pump or their apex to perform the auto wc's. I think art @art13 has something automated set up through his apex DOS

 

[art13]

I had my apex dos doing it for me for a while, it actually worked great, but due to some issues with bryopsis and some other things, along with the demand for alk and calc went up higher than i though it would be, so i switched my dos to meter in my kalk for now until i get the tank sorted out. It worked great though, i could vary it with just a quick click, i usually kept it at 1 gallon a day, had it up to 4 gallons a day at one point, maybe higher. very easy, salinity never swayed. I'd love to get a second dos unit and start that up again, i have a feeling my demand will be too high right now to put the dos back on to the water changer for a while.

 

[art13]

Once everything gets settled in, i'm going to try and get it back online, my favorite part about that system is besides feeding the tank, i only had once a month maintenance where i would refill my ato and water change can. No worrying about pulling out pumps to change water and so forth.

 

[trivan]

I don't do water changes much these days, but when I do I use a liter meter, and do about 2 gallons everyday. I agree it works well and prevents sudden spikes in water chemistry For those questions, Randy Holmes-Farley did the analysis to show that the loss of "new water" while doing continuous water changes oppose to dump out and refill is minimal.