Water Changes.

[Bambi211]

I have a 60 litre tank. And I do 20% water change every tuesday. (very precise i know, but its my only free day to do it.) Is that enough?

I only have 3 fish. Male and female swortail. And one Cardinal Tetra.

I have a fluval 3 plus filter.

Also when plants start to go brown is it best to throw them away as soon as, will them rotting be toxic to fish? I,ve recently had to chuck away some of them. Any way you can prevent this?

Also every time I change my water should I clean the filter sponges or is there no need? should i do it once every two weeks. Especially cos ive only got 3 fish atm, there wont be that much waste.

Ive had my tank for about 7/8 Months. Reason for there only being 3 fish is its took me a while to get the hang of everything. This is my first tank, and i always get carried away and buy to many fish at once. And didnt use to do enough water changes, and nitrate was to high and killed my fish. But you learn from your mistakes.

My filter is new, ive had it about a month and a bit now, because my other filter wasnt very powerful.

Any advice and information would be much helpful.

xx

 

[Gruffle]

I change 1 bucket of water every week for my 60L tank, works out about 15%. Saying that though, you can't really change too much water, but for a smaller tank doing a couple of 10L changes a week would be better than doing 30-40L at a time.

Leave the filters, overzealous cleaning of filter media will be more harm then good, you only really need to touch the filter media when you notice the flow rate visibly dropping, other than that, a squeeze in tank water every couple of months is enough to get the crap off

I'd only bother chucking plants if they break free from the substrate or are noticably dead some of my plants look dead initially and have changed colour but they just have a bit of algae on them, which my poor little plec can't really keep up with

hope this helps!

 

[Bambi211]

Yeah it did thanks !!!

xx

 

[doresy]

Hi, yes with only 3 fish your bioload is quite low even in that sized tank so your weekly 20% is spot on in my opinion.

Not knowing what you have in the way of media in your filter I would say that if you have any carbon in it then discard it and use the space for more foam media. If you have white woolen type of media (stage 1 mechanical filter media) then clean this in old tank water each water change. The rest of the media leave alone and only gently clean half of it at any one time (again, in old tank water) only when really mucky.

Oh and the poor lonely Cardinal Tetra is a shoaling fish and will be quite unhappy by itself even if it looks well

 

[spesh]

Personally I change more than that on a weekly basis.

Oscar tank 320L - Change 1/2 weekly and do a bi-weekly filter clean. If i've got time i do a 1/4 change midweek (Oscars are very messy though!)

Community Tank 125L - Change about 40% weekly and a monthly filter clean

Shrimp tank 25L - 25% twice weekly with a 2weekly filter clean

 

[doresy]

Personally I change more than that on a weekly basis.

Oscar tank 320L - Change 1/2 weekly and do a bi-weekly filter clean. If i've got time i do a 1/4 change midweek (Oscars are very messy though!)

Community Tank 125L - Change about 40% weekly and a monthly filter clean

Shrimp tank 25L - 25% twice weekly with a 2weekly filter clean

I disagree, sorry

 

[OldMan47]

Spech you are probably not hurting anything with your water changes but they are a bit extreme. The 20% number seems more reasonable unless the nitrate test shows a need for more.
Rotting plants are a fine source of ammonia if you are doing a fishless cycle but you have fish in yours so keep the brown parts trimmed and removed.
If you have been running the new filter and the old together, the new one is probably ready to take over the bioload by now. If you just swapped filters, the 20% changes have not been nearly enough nor would weekly be often enough.