6 weeks without water changes?

[Guppy breeder<>]

Hello guys,
I'm in an interesting situation right now... And I need your help. So, My family is going to Romania my home country for six weeks and we bought automatic feeders for our fish. We tested the automatic feeders and they work just fine! Put a checkmark on food for the fish they won't starve while we're gone! Now lets move on to water changes. This is where the problem is... We have a dear friend and we had planned that she would come to our home every 2 weeks and do a 25% water change to all our tanks. Then an emergency turns out and she is going to Moldova right when we're going to Romania! What's gonna happen to the fish? Can they survive that long without a water change? I have good filtration systems in the tanks but will that help? Should I do a 100% water change before I go? Or a 80% water change? Please give all the help you can give me. I dunno what to do. We don't have anyone else available to do water changes for us. BTW, The type of fish I have are mollies, guppies, and goldfish. I have 5 different tanks at home.

 

[Colin_T]

Set your automatic fish feeder to feed once every 2 days.
Add some live plants and increase lighting by an few hours each day.
Then do a big water change, gravel clean and clean the filter a couple of days before you go. The fish will be fine for 6 weeks without a water change.

When you get back, do a 10-20% water change each day for a week and then go back to normal water changes.

 

[Byron]

I concur, with one change...I would try to have them fed only once a week for the six weeks. What goes in must come out, and fish like mollies can process a lot.

 

[hansgruber7]

It's not ideal but they will probably be ok. Just keep feeding to a minimum (maybe twice a week) and do a large 80 percent water change and clean the filters the day before you leave.

 

[Guppy breeder<>]

Thank you for all your help guys!

 

[AdoraBelle Dearheart]

If you can also stuff the tanks with a load of fast growing stem plants before you go, like elodea, water wisteria, watersprite or similar, I would. Just to help the water quality and suck up as much waste as possible. Maybe not in the goldie tanks since that'll just become food, but certainly in the livebearer tanks.

Auto feeders worry me, so many horror stories of them going wrong and dumping out too much food, but I understand that you don't have a choice here, and testing them first was the right call! Can't stress enough to seriously reduce feeding while you're away though; fish really can manage on a lot less food than we normally give them, and with you being away for so long, reducing the bioload as much as possible is so important.

One thing I haven't seen anyone ask is how heavily stocked are the tanks? What size tanks, with how many fish in each? Especially with goldies and livebearers... goldies being such huge waste producers and often kept in smaller tanks than they really need, they can pollute a smaller tank quickly. Do you know what your nitrate levels usually get to between your usual water changes?

If your livebearer tanks are heavily stocked, like when growing out large batches of fry, it could help a lot to reduce the stocking if possible before you leave. For example when I was going away for a work trip, the LFS that I usually bring my livebearer young to when they're 3-4 months old and ready for sale straight away, agreed to take a large batch that were only about 2 months old, and not coloured up enough to go straight into sales tanks, keeping them out back in their own tanks until they were old enough to sell. He did that as a favour to me because I bring him a lot of fish and spend money there all the time, but some stores will also do it for a small charge. Since I didn't have anyone I could depend on to do water changes in my own tanks while I was away, it gave me the peace of mind that the bioload in my tanks was light enough that they'd be fine while I was away.