No Water Changes for 6 Months!

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
guess il stick with my sunday routine hehe
 
how much does a denitrator cost? and where can i get one? i believe fish will benefit from not having to withstand the weekly shock of changing water chemistry, temperature, and our hands in their faces. i too have heard of people who don't do water changes and have thriving fish and tanks, i believe you do it with a protein skimmer for saltwater - is this the same as a denitrator? if so i thought it didn't work with freshwater chemistry, someone please enlighten us
 
I was just reading about this stuff last night. Tetra make a chlorinator that says you can go 6 months without a water change but after six months you have to do a 50% to 75% water change. The product is called Tetra Easy Balance. Here's a link to a site selling it here. I dunno what to think abt it. I've read a sceptics report about it, and he found it was good. But this was a sceptic report found on the tetra's website. Which can be read here. I think i'm going to try this out but i'm not for a long period of time
 
Whoa ... just checked back and already 2 pages :eek:

Anyway, I also read that some parts of Australia has really terrible/fluctuating tap water. This results in many aquarists losing fish due to water changes, even when using aged, declorinated water.

Can any Aussie MFK'ers confirm this?
 
sqratch said:
i have no idea what that does... just sounds like a external canister filter
Click to expand...

Our filtration systems are aerobic, which means there's oxygen present. There are usually 2 kinds of bacteria present - one that converts ammonia to nitrite, and one that converts nitrite to nitrate. The nitrates are then removed during water changes (or by plants).

A coiled denitrator consists of a cyclinder with a long tube coiled around its outside or inside and bioballs inside. It contains a third kind of bacteria which is anaerobic i.e. it thrives in zero oxygen conditions. This bacteria lives on nitrate. Water is passed slowly down a long, coiled tube (air hose). The 2 normal aerobic bacteria are present in this coil, as they are throughout your system. Their usual processes use up the oxygen in the water, so by the time the water has passed through the coil and enters the bottom of the chamber filled with bioballs, it is oxygen free. Here the other kind of bacteria starts to thrive and will eat away at your nitrates. The water that leaves the denitrator is thus nitrate free .. supposedly.

The above is just the result of some reading I've been doing today, so please correct me if I make any mistakes ... it's also a learning process for me ;)
 
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