hurgerburger
Fish Fanatic
Recently I've been thinking about the necessity of water changes in really well-cycled tanks. First though, I'm going to tell you about my current 20 gallon tank. So, I started off with a ten gallon tank with a couple nerite snails in it when I was 10. I added a few zebra danios and an albino bristlenose pleco, but the danios all died because I was 10 and forgot to feed them. The pleco survived however, and about a year later I got another pleco because I thought the first one (Zuko) needed a friend (the second one was KitKat). I gave them another year, and completely out of nowhere (I thought they were both female) they started breeding. Every month they had more babies, I upgraded them to a 20 gallon long, and for 4 years now they have been breeding almost every month. The catch is, I didn't know how often you were supposed to do water changes, so throughout all that time, I had been doing a 50% water change maybe once or twice a YEAR when my dad would force me to. The tank isn't planted either, there used to be an Anubias but it died. It does have about an inch of nutritious substrate as well that the plecos kick up sometimes. It has a 50 gallon bioactive filter. But my experiences totally contradict what everyone here says about water changes. I also have a very heavily planted 5.5 gallon with a Betta, I have been following a similar approach with that tank too (my tap water's ammonia is 35 ppm if I remember correctly, so I don't want to stress him out) but I do do 15% water changes ever month or so, the ammonia in each tank is zero. Any thoughts?