This is a gorgeous tank, don’t get me wrong but he just lets his filter do the cleaning and just adds water. He has fancy guppies and bloody mary shrimp in it, but he also suggested to me NOT to clean my tank do all the work. At this point I don’t even know anymore cause even my parents (who know nothing about fish or fish care) are like “clean my tank once a month”. What should I even do? I only have a betta fish (who is in a hospital tank atm) but he gave me quite a lot of shrimp for my 5 gal tank…
Posted by Lonely_Importance_61
6 Comments
you can absolutely go without changing the water in a tank, but only one that is live planted. the live plants will help soak up those excess nitrates in the water, which is one of the things you remove with water changes. my shrimp are amazing at eating old food and gunk that falls onto the floor of the aquarium. they help a lot with that. i do a small (20%) water change on my tank once every 6 months just to remove any build up of minerals and debris in the water column. the biggest thing is make sure you are testing your water. if you have live plants but still have nitrates over 40ppm you need to be doing water changes to remove those. i will clean detritus (poop or debris on the gravel) when i do my water changes and that is it. shrimp love consistency, i found that when i was doing regular water changes with shrimp they would all die due to the abrupt changes in their environment. so just make sure you are testing your water, and adjust your water changes accordingly to whatever your tank needs to thrive!
As i understand, your fish produce ammonia, which bacteria break into nitrites, and further into nitrates, plants eat nitrates, so with enough plants and low enough stocking, your plants will keep your nitrates low to the point that there’s nothing to remove via water changes. That’s the thought behind the Walstad method.
Combine that with a clean-up crew of shrimp, snails, and algae eaters, there’s not much to do but feeding, top offs, and filter maintenance.
Imo, your uncle is living the dream
It has to be bioactive, heavy planted, good substrate, nutrients supplements for water, stuff like that
Beautiful tank. The only cleaning one might have to do with a tank like this is to trim and remove excess plant growth. Easy peasy.
There’s a lot of bickering about this in the hobby but imo it really comes down to how the tank is setup. With lots of plants, lots of biological filtration, limited feedings, and a limited bioload, you can create a stable environment. Basically, you want to create a system that removes more of the harmful stuff, like ammonia and nitrites, than you put in. Plants are great at doing this and Walstad tanks are a popular example of putting this to use.
I have a pretty heavily planted tank and don’t really have to do any water changes so far, just top offs. I test my water at least once a week and with as many plants as I have, almost everything is sucked right up. I’ve only had one ammonia spike so far and it was just after I added several fish and by the next day it was fine. So I think he’s fine and correct so long as it’s well planted.