Making Aquarium Water Changes Easier - EP 2: Saltwater Aquarium Maintenance

www.bulkreefsupply.com Water changes in your saltwater aquarium play a major role in the health of your reef tank. In today's episode of BRStv, we discuss ways to make changing the water easier so you do it more often. Let's face it, water changes are not the highlight of owning a reef tank. It can be time consuming, waiting for your RO system to produce the water, waiting for the water to heat up and getting the correct level of salinity to be able to use the water. Then you have to remove the water from your tank and replace it with the new salt water all while keeping the salinity in your tank stable.

So here a few ways to hopefully make it easier:

1. Get two containers that are the same size and a three way valve. Be sure you have enough space for both these containers. This will ensure you always have a waiting batch of freshwater from your RO System. When the saltwater container is empty, simply turn the valve to fill up with the heated water, add your salt and you are ready to go. Go one step further and put a timer on the container of freshwater. If you always do a water change on Sunday, you can set the timer to heat and aerate the water on Saturday night and turn off on Sunday - saving you energy because you are not heating the water all the time. It is a good idea to always keep the saltwater container heated with some flow to avoid precipitation issues.

2. Get two same-size containers matching the amount of water change you would like to do. For example, if you want to "change" 25 gallons for your 100 gallon tank each time, mark a line on the container at 25 gallons coupled with the container which also holds 25 gallons. This way you can completely empty the freshwater container, thus eliminating the process of adding small amounts of salt over and over again to get to the proper salinity. Same freshwater volume, same salt added, same salinity - it won't be perfect but it will get you pretty close.

3. Removing the saltwater from your old tank can be a pain and no one likes hauling buckets around - they're heavy and they make complete mess. Try the water change hoses that start the siphon by turning on the faucet (no sucking up tank water with your mouth - yuck) and the old water just goes down the drain.

4. Pump the water directly to your tank from the storage container. If your tank and storage container are close enough this is a great option. Get a large submersible pump like a Sicce that can handle the head pressure and just pump the water to the tank.

Finally, people often ask about the large water containers you see in many of our BRStv videos. We don't sell them at bulkreefsupply.com as they would be too expensive to ship. The brand we use are Norwesco but you can look up a farm supply or plumbing supply store in your area.

Are you going to try any of these tricks to make your water changes easier? Are you already doing them or have other great ideas for decreasing the pain of water changes? Let us know in the comments below.