worley
10-27-2008, 05:23 AM
Ok, so one of the ideas of the algae scrubber is to reduce (or maybe eliminate) water changes.
Obviously certain chemicals are going to be depleted that will need to be replaced that would normally be done through water changes.
What would people recommend?
I'm guessing:
Calcium
Magnesium
Strontium
Iodine
Trace elements
Maybe amino acids/vitamins?
I'm afraid I can be lazy and sometimes doing a water change on a smaller tank is easier than doing a load of tests and dosing everything (I have a decent RO/DI unit, so making up new water isn't too hard). I can see that in big systems that dosing is easier than doing larger water changes, but I don't think my 110 gal system is up to the size yet.
What does everyone else do? Maybe doing a few additives once a week with a monthly water change? Iodine, trace elements and amino acids/vits are of course a lot easier to dose as generally require no tests.
Generally in the past I've not had to dose much as when I had a shop it was easy to do water changes with large vats of RO/SW made up already, so weekly water changes were just a matter of turning a few taps and cleaning glass (oh for an algae scrubber on our shop system!!)
Obviously certain chemicals are going to be depleted that will need to be replaced that would normally be done through water changes.
What would people recommend?
I'm guessing:
Calcium
Magnesium
Strontium
Iodine
Trace elements
Maybe amino acids/vitamins?
I'm afraid I can be lazy and sometimes doing a water change on a smaller tank is easier than doing a load of tests and dosing everything (I have a decent RO/DI unit, so making up new water isn't too hard). I can see that in big systems that dosing is easier than doing larger water changes, but I don't think my 110 gal system is up to the size yet.
What does everyone else do? Maybe doing a few additives once a week with a monthly water change? Iodine, trace elements and amino acids/vits are of course a lot easier to dose as generally require no tests.
Generally in the past I've not had to dose much as when I had a shop it was easy to do water changes with large vats of RO/SW made up already, so weekly water changes were just a matter of turning a few taps and cleaning glass (oh for an algae scrubber on our shop system!!)