Automatic water change system for discus breeding set up

[Adam.]

Hi everyone

New to the forums and after a bit of advice.

I will be acquiring a breeding pair of discus soon and will be setting up a Fish house in an insulated shed for my project.

I have had discus before and understand the water parameters needed and also the frequency of water changes for healthy fish.

My set up will include a triple rack shelf with the breeding tank which is 24w x 12d x 18h, and two growout tanks which are 48w x 18d x 18h.

All tanks will be bare bottom and filtered with sponge filters. I will be planning a 100% water change on the tanks daily and want a quick and easy method for this.

As I need to change around 600 litres a day I want to set up an auto water change system. Does anybody have an experience with these and have some ideas that could help?

I’m thinking of 1000 litre water container as I can get one free, and would like to set it so my ro unit fills up to 500 litres and cuts off, then my mains water turns on and cuts off at 650 litres, then an auto doser to dechlorinate the water. This is the ratio of mains water to ro I have found gives me the water parameters required. The container will have a large air stone and a heater set to the same temp as the tanks.

How could I set this up so that once a day the water is pumped to each individual tank and the waste water pumped out?

Thanks for any help guys, if I can’t make it work it’ll be a manual job for girlfriend whilst I’m at work lol.

 

[mikey11]

i would suggest an automatic drip system if your changing water that frequently.....there are lots of videos on youtube to make them yourself.....here is just one example.....

 

[Adam.]

Is the drip system effective enough for a 100% change for discus?

I was thinking more along the lines of something that will pump in the whole contents of the tank in around 30-60 minutes.

I was thinking that the drip method would only be diluting the water on a small scale as the clean water is massively diluted by the old water and gets drained away.

Am I wrong in thinking this? If not that looks like quite a simple setup I could use

 

[mikey11]

thats the nice thing about a drip system, you can change the speed of it whenever you want to make it faster or slower....lets take a 50 gallon tank as an example, if you want to change 100% of the water every day, then you set the drip to drip in about 2 gallons every hour....so in 24 hours it would be changing 48 gallons....if you wanna change 50% per day then you lower the drip down to 1 gallon per hour

 

[Adam.]

I found a calculator online that works out water change roughly based on a drip method. My total tank volume will be around 600 litres, dripping in the same amount will change around 63% daily.

Will this be enough for growing on discus fry? I will still be changing a small amount manually too each day when I clean the bottom of the tanks

 

[mikey11]

I have bred angelfish and discus.....the most i ever changed on my grow out tanks was 50%-60% per day, but i have never used a drip system,

my breeding/growout tanks are all bare bottom tanks with sponge air powered filters.....

i have had about 200 babies or more in a 35 gallon tank till they were about the size of a quarter, and i found 50%-60% per day was sufficient even with that many fish.....my "success to loss" ratio was very good