Nitrate Problem

[chrisbassist]

I would imagine that like most things it's word of mouth.if you haven't done a water change in a while, maybe the ph dropped, when you do a water change the ph shock could kill.

In a properly maintained tank, it's not an issue.

But say it happens to one idiot, he tells everyone his water change killed his fish, suddenly all those people think water changes overly stress the fish. If it happens often enough (and there are a lot of idiots out there) then it will become one of the accepted truths.

 

[OldMan47]

Many people have the same idea of water changes that I had a few years ago. We have all seen long established tanks that seldom have any water changes have a very adverse effect from a single water change. We come to the conclusion that a large water change is a bad thing. What does that really mean? It means that we have kept fish in a situation where water changes were seldom ever done. When we decided to do a water change for some reason, our fish were subjected to huge changes in their mineral content. Our fish were indeed stressed by such a change. Instead of that situation, today we change water whenever there is any indication that things are not perfect. That means that your fish will never see the changes we saw just a few years ago from such changes. OK, so what do you do next? You ignore all old advice that feared water changes and just use a decent dechlorinator and worry not at all about doing a water change. Since we do not restrict our water changes in any way, the water change has only a small effect on water parameters and our fish never show any stress from the changes we do.
I hope this helps you understand the difference between today's water change and the one of yesteryear. They are really not the same thing at all.

 

[waterdrop]

Nice post OM, very well put and I agree. WD