As promised I am starting my series of “mini-posts” to add some updated info on what’s been going on with my tank and the addiction hobby during my long absence from posting here.

I thought I’d start with the topic of water changes.  Many a debate can and has been had over this subject.  While most of us do them as a part of our regular tank maintenance, there are many differing opinions and approaches.  Personally I’ve tried everything from daily, to weekly, monthly and even semi-annual.  While they all worked, hands down the small daily water change has shown the most effective for coral health in my system.  Some of you may have read my post a while back about the automated system I set up to do these small daily water changes.  In a nutshell it’s a large reservoir I mix and hold saltwater in.  I use a small pump on a digital timer to deliver about 3 gallons of this new saltwater each morning to the display tank.  In turn this displaces the same amount of water in the sump which is forced out of the overflow I installed.  Presto, water change is done before I’m even out of bed.  All I have to do is refill the reservoir with RO/DI water and add the appropriate amount of salt every 10 days or so.  I used this system for quite a while with excellent results.  Then, one day I got a wild hair, decided I wasn’t vacuuming the sand-bed enough, and so turned the automated system off and started doing manual 10% or so water changes every 7-10 days.  This allowed me to vacuum the sand at the same time I was doing the water change.  I know, I know, why take something that is nearly completely automated and working well and go backwards with it.  Well, it did actually prove educational in a good way.  I can’t say that my coral health suffered per se with the weekly 10% method, but after going back to this method for a while I did see a slight decline in color and polyp extension.  So, I set back up the automated system and went back to the daily 3 gallon water changes.  With-in just a few weeks the change was obvious.  Polyp extension returned to the crazy level it was before and some of the corals that colors had faded a bit began to regain color.  My take on this is that the small daily water changes do a better job of replenishing and maintaining trace elements at proper levels.  Of course the other side of water changes is the removal of excess nutrients, and the daily method doesn’t do quite as good a job at this.  However, I have a large skimmer, a turf scrubber and I’m careful with my feeding; as such nutrients don’t seem to be an issue for me.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  There are lots of ways to achieve the same goal in this hobby.  I also realize that having a basement fish room gives me tons of space for my equipment that might make this method impractical for many people.  That said, for my system this method clearly yields results I’ve been unable to duplicate with any other method…and not having to lug buckets of water around every week is nice too!

Oh, and that deal with vacuuming the sand.  I still feel the need to vacuum the accumulated detritus and other gunk out of the sand-bed every few weeks.  Being a die-hard DIY’er I devised a system that allows me to use my gravel vac to siphon into a filter sock in a bucket and then pump the water back into the display.  So now I can have my cake and eat it too!

I like to always include a photo with each post.  Truth is, I havn’t taken many new ones lateley.  So I leave you with a FTS from a few weeks ago.

Happy Reefing!