Im generally curious on how often you guys test your tanks, and why! Feel free to add your tank size, filter type, if your tank is planted/what plants, the stock, what you test with, and how often you do a water change. Id love tank pics too!
If im being honest, I dont really test my tank often. Maybe once a week or every other week, usually along with my water change (every other week). I have a 10 gallon tank with my nerite snail (Shrimp) and my betta (Atlas). Theres quite a few floating plants consisting of frog bit, salvinia, and a few water lettuce. I also have some amazon sword, mini sword, java fern, anubias, and hornwort. The parameters are consistent, 7.4ph, 0ppm ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate. I obviously cycled the tank before hand I think the floating plants combined with the low bioload leads me to less water changes and overall less testing due to the consistency. I used to test twice a week but slowly fell out of it. So.. feel free to tell me how often you test and why!
https://i.redd.it/fvnxvm32pu2g1.jpeg
Posted by Successful_Salt_1838
16 Comments
Forgot to add that I use an API freshwater master test kit!
I test when there is an issue. Like my puffer was acting weird, he had an ammonia spike. Other than that, never.
I tested while I waited for it to cycle and establish, I test before adding a new species in, and I test if I notice any problems in my plants or animals.
In the beginning I tested weekly. Now that my tanks are established, it’s only maybe once a month with a water change, I’m just to keep an eye on the nitrates
My tank is 4 years old and planted so I only test if something seems off
Never really, nothing about my tanks has fundamentally changed in 2 years to warrant testing.
Only test when my fish have issues but I’m setting up a new tank tomorrow so will be testing daily.
Controversial hot take incoming lol …. I don’t test my water 🤯 (I have 12 tanks now, but of course daily when I first started as I was so paranoid 😂)
Pretty much never outside of cycling.
An established, well-maintained tank isn’t going to have a sudden ammonia or nitrite spike out of nowhere, especially if it’s well-planted. Nitrate is an absolute non-issue unless it exceeds 40ppm, which generally doesn’t happen if you’re on top of your water changes & the tank isn’t overstocked.
Depends. If I recently added fertilizer/root tabs or new fish I’ll text every other day for a bit to make sure it’s okay. If not I test once every 1-2 weeks when I do a water change to see if I need to add any nitrate fertilizer (my tank is always super low on nitrates due to having a lot of plants)
Only test if I see something/worry something is off, or if I’ve just done a massive water change (ie, which I had to do recently due to rearranging the tank and adding in new plants and a bunch of stuff)
Never. I have the full kit though…
My freshwater tanks, almost never.
My reef aquarium with coral, clams, and anemones? Religiously. Every couple of days for alkalinity, and a monthly lab test that I mail out.
5 gallons, undergravel filter.
I check nitrate once a week or so to see if I’m adding enough fertilizer. If nitrate is 20 ppm or below then I up the fertilizer, over 40 ppm I cut back.
Otherwise I don’t really test. I don’t even own an ammonia test. With the undergravel filter, my cat could probably piss in the tank and the ammonia would be gone in 5 minutes.
https://preview.redd.it/j4ug3fw0zu2g1.jpeg?width=2160&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b0d861e9d816f24988eead764d5a37c8d3eddfd7
These are our betta/community tanks. 20g, 10g, 35g, 20g and 15g. Canister filters in all of them. Only thing we test for these days is potassium and phosphates (jbl kit) in the 35g lol The other tests (api) are only if something is very clearly wrong, but nothing’s been wrong here for a very long time – tanks are very well established, mature and stable. Water is crystal clear and there’s lot of microfauna in all of them too. In spite of most of them being heavily planted, we still do our weekly water changes though.
I do weekly water tests and weekly water changes. Tests are usually done on a Wed and changes are done normally on Saturday no matter what the test shows. If any test shows ammonia or nitrite I do an immediate water change and if the nitrate level is above 20 I do a water change. No real reason for doing them like that, it is just the system I have and have been doing for a while now. It works for me.