Let me share with you how I manage to keep overpopulated fish tanks clean and healthy without doing weekly water change. I use this technique at work for all my clients.
First of all, any aquarium, lakes and ponds needs a way to eliminate pollution produce by fish and other inhabitant. Your aquarium really on your filter, plants and live rock (for reef tank) to eliminate this pollution. Because most of the time this is not enough, we do water changes. If pollution build up to fast, larger or more frequent water changes are needed and this is where aquarium maintenance becomes time consuming.
There is no way my clients will accept to pay me to service there tanks more than once a week so I had to figure out how to get good results with limited maintenance. The way I proceed to only service these tanks is to make sure that filtration is strong enough to eleminate all that crap for me. The filtration system I’ll show you is so strong that bacteria in it consume complete the azote cycle and eliminate No3 and Po4. Yes that’s right! You can build yours using any canister filter or phosban reactor (even an aquaclear filter could do for a small tank).
You can find all the supply needed for this project at madcaptains.com
Bacteria in your filter has the following limiting factors :
1. The amount of available food.
2. The amount of accessible oxygen.
3. The total surface platforms to form colonies.
4. Water temperature; and
5. pH range.
The Solution:
Here on plant Earth, in any ecosystem, if the inhabitants are to survive, the Nitrogen Cycle must be established and the poisonous nitrogen compounds brought down to tolerable levels.
Ensure minimum limitation for bacteria life grow and you’ll get a nitrogen cycle able to do the job. With a real good filtration system, you could easily have a pollution reading close to 0 without doing all that maintenance and these water changes.
How to do this :
1-you need a really large bacteria bed (platform to form the colonies). There is two ways to do this : you first option is to have a super large filter and the second is to use a media that has a really large surface area in contact with water. I use an activated carbon call Tri Base Pelletized Carbon. It has a surface area in contact with water up to 10X larger than most filtration media on the market. Plus, it has available carbon. When use as a bacteria bed (and not as a chemical reducer), Tri Base Pelletized Carbon have a 4 years life time!
2- I do not wait anymore for cycling. I use a bacteria call Right Now Bacteria. This bacteria grow really fast and will establish on the carbon within only a few hours. It also resist to copper and can survive within a large temperature range. It contains many different organism that work all together at different level. What’s great about it is that I only need to use it once to get long lasting results. Right Now Bactria is the bacteria that will remove all that pollution for us. You will not get no3 and po4 reduction without it.
Here is a graph showing results in a small reef tank
As you see, results are great and what’s great is that it work for all tanks.
By the way, I still do water changes once in a while but much less and much smaller. My main task is to rince the carbon in the filter once a month.
An other great thing about this bacteria combined with Tri Base Pelletized Carbon is that bacteria grow fast enough to cycle the tank within 24h only! I never lost a fish doing this (I have done this 100s of times). I have made water testing every hours many time and it always showed good water for healty fish.
But remember, if you try this system, you'll need both the bacteria AND the carbon.
It’s realy cheap to get a filtration system like this. Yes, Tri Base Pelletized Carbon is more expensive than any other activated carbon on the market but with a 4 years life, it pay for it self quickly.
If you want to give this a try, there is a simple but really important protocol to follow. Make sure you ask for it before you buy.
There is also some other things I use for tanks that I really have no time to take care of. The pH adjustment rock are great because they hold pH in salt water tanks and last certainly over 10 years. The only problem with it is that it can take some time and tune-up before it is totally stable so it could be risky if install on an old reef tank with fancy corals. When it’s a new tank, I do use it because I have all my time and can make adjustment without risk.
Trace Elements block are one of the goods I use in all salt water tanks (not fresh water) running with that filtration system. The reason I use these block is because they supply trace elements and all magnesium I need. The carbon has the inconvenient to remove these trace elements so we need constant supply. What I like about it is that I do not need to dose. I simply add one block and an other one when the first one has dissolved. On fresh water tanks, these extra goods are not needed.
So if you find aquarium maintenance time consuming or allays pollution problems I invite you to give this method a try. It work for me and will work for you for sure.
