A Few Questions

[sneezy]

I am finally stocking my tank tomorrow and just have a few questions.

How often should I continue testing the water daily after the fish are in?

Will a weekly 20% water change be sufficient.

What is the highest my nitrate should ever read?

Many Thanks

 

[OldMan47]

The most likely time for your water to change is right after you put in new fish. This is true of the first fish and each time you add to the population. For that reason, I would do lots of testing the day or two after thge new fish to make sure things are going alright. After that you could back off on the testing when you know things are fine. I try to keep my nitrates at less than 40 ppm. The size of my water changes gets adjusted as I notice that what I'm changing is enough or not enough to keep within that level. I know of people who are happy to go to 80 ppm so they would change less than I would each week. It depends on what works for you and what your tap water is like. If tap water had 20 ppm to start with, maybe 60 ppm would be a good target.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

yeah keep up daily testing for the first few weeks to see what happens, after a couple of weeks your out of the woods so you can go to weekly testing, after 6 months or so you can drop down to testing once a month, once the tanks been running for a good while and it's mature and stable you won't need to test all the time, we just test if we anticipate a problem or if a fish is showing any symptoms of disease.

start off with weekly water changes of around one third, monitor your nitrates, if they're climbing by more than 20ppm in a week then step up the changes to a bit more, if they're under or around 20% in a week then changing a third of the water is fine.

nitrate is a controversial one, you'll read lots of places saying keep it below 40ppm, well in London the tap water has nitrate of 40ppm so you're never gonna it lower than that!! there is evidence to suggest that most average trops don't start to suffer until you reach 400ppm or even higher. generally i would say though, you test your tap water, add around 40ppm onto that, and that's what you should be aiming for as a maximum.