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Re: Aquatic Plants Digest V3 #455
In a message dated 8/18/98, 4:12:42 AM, Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com writes:
<<Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 15:33:35 -0500
>Subject: Who has successful low water-change setups?
>Who's had a successful long-term setup (approaching a year or more) with
>minimal and/or infrequent water changes (<10%/month or so on average). If
>you had one for less, what caused you to return to frequent water changes?
I managed for 4-6 months with just topping up- at this point the plants
stopped growing, looked stunted and eventually turned yellow and some started
to look close to entering the plant beyond world. Apon. lost all their leaves
etc. When I returned to doing water changes, new leaves appeared and the
plants started growing again, some however did not recover well and still look
stunted.
My recomendation do water changes, if you can't afford the time to once or
twice a week do 10-20% water changes, you should seriously look at finding
another past time, it only takes me 15- 20 minutes 2x per week, just about the
time for 2 or 3 commercials in any TV show.
>I've been inadvertently just topping-off over 4 months now and my plants
>are still doing great, though growing slower than at first.
In my experience they will get slower still leading to their possible demise.
> I've got a light fish load,
Fish need the water changes also, they will not show distress as fast as some
plants, but once they do their demise is quicker, and I have found that going
back to frequent water changes may not reverse the effects on certain fish.
>though it's definitely yellowed some since my last real water change.
It is when the yellowing of the water starts to occur that problems begin to
manifest in my experiences. A charcoal filter will get rid of the yellow
colour but the imbalance is still there.
>I'd like to keep running in this ultra-low-maintenance mode, but I'd like
>to get some pointers from those who've been here before. I'm looking for
>ballpark numbers on the amount of time it takes for high concentrations of
>toxic chemicals to build up and possible correlations between plant species
>used and the prevention of this build-up.
>Carlos E. Munoz
The above are just my experiences, others may not have had these problems. The
result may vary depending on the quality of your water to begin with. I have
found that just topping up a tank and not changing the water, leads to a
buildt up of salts etc..
John van Rompu
jvanrompu at aol_com
Toronto, Canada