I Will Never Do A Water Change

[Ace Of Spades]

bettas should be put in microwaves.

Agreed.

Lol joke, Its good you are doing water changes now mate but would of been better ifyou started sooner. But its good your doing it and will benefit your fish....

 

[Miss Wiggle]

Eeeew, I change mine at least twice a week! imagine sleeping in the same covers for years!

memories of Uni come flooding back!!! I might go and get a pot noodle for old times sake!!

lol, me too!!!

So how come this has never happened? that they die? they dont.

Hi Beany,

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who keep fish in the same manner you do. Your fish may appear helathy, but because they aren't dead doesn't mean they are fine.

Your nitrate will most likely be sky high, and maybe ammonia and nitrite too depending on how heavily stocked your tank is. Your pH will have crashed, probably down to 5.0 or so and therefore your filter bacteria won't be doing their job properly, however, because your pH is so low, most of your total ammonia content will be ammonium which is less toxic.

As well as the by-products of the nitrogen cycle building up in your tank, there will be things like cigarette smoke if you smoke, deoderant, air freshener and many other things which float around your house. Over time these can build to dangerous levels in your tank too, but your fish will get used to them, hence you thinking they are ok.

Heres an experiment for you. If you've never done a water change on your tank, i challenge you to add a new fish and keep it alive without water changes. I bet you cant. The reason why is that your fish have become accustoned to your terrible water conditions and so appear ok, but a new fish which isn't used to it should die almost instantly because of the huge change in water parameters. This is well explained along with other aspects of this style of fishkeeping in the link below. It is commonly called 'Old Tank Syndrome'. I'm sure you will be able to identify with most of the symptoms.

Please have a read and educate yourself regarding the benefits of water changes.

<a href="http/www.bestfish.com/oldtank.html" target="_blank">http/www.bestfish.com/oldtank.html</a>

One thing i would like to stress is that if you do decide to start doing water changes (which i hope you do for the sake of your fish), you must start with very small water changes. The reason is because the water in your tank will have a radically different make up from the water from your tap. If you perform large water changes, these rapid changes will kill your fish. Your pH will rise, making ammonia more toxic, etc etc. You need to biuld up the water changes very slowly. I advise to start with maybe a 5% change, and then another 2 days later. Do this for a few weeks and then increase to 10 % changes.

Large and frequent water changes are of great benefit in a fish tank, but only when the water from the tap roughly matches the parameters in the tank. Yours won't.

Hope this helps you, and i hope you join the world of the water changes.

that's basically what i was gonna say, but written quite a lot better

a tank that is well planted can handle the nitrate build up, it's the other effects that you need to worry about. if you look into planted tanks there are plenty that don't get regularl water changes and the substrates never get vacc'ed, but even those tanks will get a water change once every couple of months to keep everything else in order.

I seem to recall a hypothesis that different bacteria strains deal with the nitrogenous waste at lower pH, but these are far slower to grow than those strains which live above pH 6.

don't know if it's a hypothesis or the truth or what, but Mr Monks has told me about this before, may be worth giving him a nudge for some further info on the subject.

 

[zephi]

Before I changed my tank to brackish, I had a self-sustaining tank, no water changes required, just needed to top up the tank every week due to evaporation.
It was a 20G tank 3/4 filled. There was about 5 long branches of egaria(15cm long), rocks for hiding and one piece of driftwood.
I kept in that tank 2 freshwater yabbys, 4 gobies, a few pond snails and about 10 mosquitofish (a pest in Australia).
All I needed to do was clean the filter once a fortnight, and feed them once every 2-3days. I usually fed them fish flakes, sometimes I add small bits of raw chicken, prawn, fish flesh.
I had this tank running for well over a year, tested the water every week, and everything remained at safe levels.
It's quite a small bio-load.. that could be the reason why nothing drastic happened. Probably the egaria and algae would absorb all nitrates faster than it was produced.