We all have a friend in the hobby or know someone who constantly brags about how he or she has never done a water change and their tank is perfect. The corals are growing and colorful, the fish vibrant and active and all seems right in this tank. To add insult to injury, he also says that he rarely does any testing in the tank. I have seen the comments and threads by numerous hobbyists making these claims and to be honest I am jealous. In all the years that I have been keeping reef tanks my tanks have never been successful when I wasn’t doing regular water changes on my tanks.
As we all know there are countless ways to set up successful tanks so I am neither advocating nor denigrating using one system or methodology or another. I am an advocate of making things as simple and easy to do as possible. As I have learned through experience the easier something is to do the more likely I am to do it. And I am assuming that most of my reef keeping brethren are the same. I think a continued discussion of this topic is especially warranted now since the Triton methodology for keeping a successful tank is gaining momentum.
The other reason I am bringing up this topic now is that approximately a year ago my friend Ben “Diesel” VanderNoort began a discussion of water changes on several sites and needless to say the varied opinions on the matter stirred much debate. As a result of going back and reading those threads it is clear that there are numerous opinions as to what is the “best” way to do this. Obviously there are the “no water change group” but this is still a minority. Then there are few who advocate the do a change when conditions are starting to deteriorate. But the majority two groups are the large change once a month group and the small frequent water change group. All of these groups have their advocates and their detractors.
Interestingly there is also a major difference of opinion as to why a water change is needed in the first place.The largest group in these discussions advocates doing water changes as a means for adding substances that are used up by the tank’s inhabitants over time. The other group uses water changes as a means from removing undesirable compounds that have accumulated in a tank.
现在，许多业余爱好者都担心要消耗的元素，而换水是一种补充事物的一种方式，与过去如何看待水的变化明显不同。这可能证明了蛋白质脱脂的良好以及用树脂和其他化合物的使用是为了清除水箱水中的所有物质。我一直在更赞成过度设置坦克，然后添加我想要的东西，而不是依靠撇渣器去除“正确”的东西。但是，由于我现在确实运行非常有效的撇渣器，所以我可以看到此参数的价值。
只要我记得我，我每月都在做一次大型水的罐子上的水。On my old 1200 gallon tank I did a 300 gallon water change every month for 5 years and the tank did fine.I did this size water change as I had a 300 gallon reservoir and when I set up the tank I set this up at the same time as I did the tank with all the related pumps and valves so that when a water change ws done it would result in the corals being out of for the water for as little time as possible. So when I downsized to a 300 gallon tank I moved down to a 50 gallon reservoir and did the same once a month water change pretty much for the same reason.然而,在通过本的在线讨论threads I decided to try something different.明年，我将每周进行25加仑的水分。
Since I do weekly water testing, before I did the switch I kept a log of the tank’s parameters and here is the average for what they were for the 3 months prior to making the switch:
Nothing outstanding and nothing out of the ordinary.因此，在此实验中，除了水变速率和频率之外，我没有其他任何更改。I switched the GFO every 4 months just as I had in the past. The calcium reactor was run the same, and any other additives were all kept the same. Also for the 2 months prior to making the switch I weighed how much detritus, dry weight, was being removed during a water change. It was approximately 150 grams dry weight per water change.
与掠夺一样，我主要进行水更换以去除“不良”物质，而不是补充缺少的物质，因此我很好奇是否进行更频繁的更改会产生任何可以量化的结果。因此，进行这25加仑每周换水的最后三个月的平均读数如下：
Again nothing remarkable, just possibly an incremental improvement in the parameters, but nothing that demonstrated a marked change from when I did monthly changes.Also note that the saltwater mix I used throughout was Instant Ocean, as has been the case since I began keeping reefs, so again nothing was changed that was being done to the tank except more frequent water changes. One thing that was noted that by doing more frequent water changes, more detritus was being removed as the dry weight of detritus during the last two months of water changes average between 80-100 grams dry weight. So almost a pound of detritus was being remove per month while the previous change system removed less than half this amount.
Since I view the tank daily it was hard for me to see overall significant differences, but my videographer Russ Kikel usually only sees the tank once a quarter when we are making videos so he was much more attuned to letting me know if there was any difference. For the first 6 months neither he nor I really saw much of a difference. The tank has always been packed with corals and fish and despite the heavy bioload has done well.然而，在大约6个月的标记处，我注意到许多并没有真正表现出太多增长的珊瑚突然开始真正起飞。同样，当他掌握第一件事时，他指出，尽管他无法将手指放在上面，但珊瑚的整体颜色似乎确实更明亮了。当我们比较他的视频是前一年与现在的视频拍摄的时，很明显，珊瑚的颜色确实变得更加强烈。
我有包括从一年前和照片the present for comparison. I will acknowledge that I do move corals around and in and out of my tanks so obviously only those corals that can be seen in each picture can be compared, and this may be difficult as I wish I were a better photographer. So for anyone close by you are welcome to stop and see for yourself.Also my tank contains more fish and corals than most tanks, so their effects of more frequent water changes could be more impressive in my tank owing to how much quicker bad substances probably accumulate.But for everyone who has seen the tank a year apart, the comments have been very consistent. The colors of the blue, green and purple corals now really pop in comparison to how they looked a year ago. And while I do accept that this improvement in color may simply be the result of their finally acclimating to the tank and then growing, some of these corals had been in the tank for over two years before I started doing more frequent water changes and had shown little to no growth over this time.
As has been discussed countless times there are countless ways to successfully set up and manage a reef tank and everyone has an idea of what is best for them.我知道这是一个例子，但是对我而言，也可能看到了相似的结果的本，进行更频繁的小水变化可能会逐步改善坦克的成功。Since for the most part we are now as successful as we have ever been in keeping the myriad organisms that we now do, most of our improvements will be incremental and doing small water changes may be one of them.Maybe next in one of my tanks I will try the Triton method of no water changes. After all like most of us I strive for making the hobby as easy and as much fun as possible.
