The Official Asylum Freshwater Tank Thread

Victor808 · 02-11-2015, 12:38 PM

I want to re-start having tanks when we move to a slightly bigger place. Being a city-boy I never have space for anything bigger than a 35G.

Flynn, I remember making a majorly dumb mistake once with an old tank, I just couldn't get the more sensitive fish to stay alive (rams especially) and was getting a lot of illness.

I realized that I was gradually increasing the salt concentration in my water changes... mainly because I was an idiot. When I did water-changes, I never took evaporation into account. Lets say I had a 35G tank, and that over a 3 week time there was about a half a gallon of evaporation... when I did a 30% water change I'd take out 10G, but replace that 10G with 10.5G of new water. As I always added a small amount of aquarium salt to my new water, that 0.5G replacement of slightly salted water was raising the tank salinity slightly every 2-3 weeks.

I don't know if this is a problem with your set-up, but it took me a while to figure it out... I just had a blind spot to that issue. I think it wasn't until I was looking at some salt-water tank videos and they were discussing automatic pumps to add fresh-water to maintain the strict salinity that I realized I was probably really screwing stuff up.

02-11-2015, 12:38 PM	#40
Victor808 How Did I Get Here? Join Date: Mar 2014 First Name: Victor Location: The 'Loin Posts: 121 Trading: (1)	Re: The Official Asylum Freshwater Tank Thread I want to re-start having tanks when we move to a slightly bigger place. Being a city-boy I never have space for anything bigger than a 35G. Flynn, I remember making a majorly dumb mistake once with an old tank, I just couldn't get the more sensitive fish to stay alive (rams especially) and was getting a lot of illness. I realized that I was gradually increasing the salt concentration in my water changes... mainly because I was an idiot. When I did water-changes, I never took evaporation into account. Lets say I had a 35G tank, and that over a 3 week time there was about a half a gallon of evaporation... when I did a 30% water change I'd take out 10G, but replace that 10G with 10.5G of new water. As I always added a small amount of aquarium salt to my new water, that 0.5G replacement of slightly salted water was raising the tank salinity slightly every 2-3 weeks. I don't know if this is a problem with your set-up, but it took me a while to figure it out... I just had a blind spot to that issue. I think it wasn't until I was looking at some salt-water tank videos and they were discussing automatic pumps to add fresh-water to maintain the strict salinity that I realized I was probably really screwing stuff up.