quick question

my tank is a little over 5 months old and I have been doing 20% water changes consistently since it's been up. just tested it and water params seem fine and everything looks healthy and growing (except for cyano, but who doesn't have that at first). question is should I keep up my water changes every week or slack up a little bit I was about to change it before I tested it and figured since it looks good should I just save the water for another week.

 

no you sould never stop doing WC. you need to replace all the trace elements witch get used up over time.

 

IMO weekly is better. if you slack off you might make that a habit and eventually you'll be doing water changes MONTHLY XD. Besides if you have corals you'd be replenishing all the elements ur corals needs

 

what size tank is it?

I generally do 10-20 percent every 2 weeks on my 72 gallon

 

a good rule I use is change out 50% per month, so I used to do 5g per week on my 55g. Factoring in the water displaced by the rock/sand it worked out nicely. I also dosed bi-weekly with ALK/CA/MG, and everything did really well.

 

well IMO dosing is just a pain in the @$$ XD

 

Weekly changes at 20 % seem a bit excessive for me. You could easily get away with doing that type of wc every month or so. Some people do bi-monthly 20 % wc, others don't even do water changes and add trace elements, providing filtration is working properly. When I started I WC every week. Now, I haven't done a water change in 3 months, to be honest.... things are growing very well.

I could slack off to a monthly change and then see if you notice any difference when you do the water change. This is frown upon, but I know several people that keep successful reefs this way.

 

I agree with Magnus. 20% a week is way excessive and will get expensive quick. Bi-weekly changes of that amount are all you need or a 10% weekly imo.

 

it doesn't really bother me much, you figure you put all this time and $ into this hobby so what's the extra few mins it takes to dose, easy stuff

 

well then again im speaking from the perspective of starting and keeping a 10 gallon nano. so i think weekly would be good for me XD