jtellis26

With a fairly new tank (about 6 weeks), how often should I be doing water changes, or if at all? It is a 100 gallons, 80lbs of live rock, one clown and a small amount of invertebrates.

Stang Man

Once a month with a 10 to 20 percent water change you should at least test water once a week, also by water change will replenish water quality depending on your set up what type setup do you have can you give me more details?

jtellis26

Thank you. I get my salt-water from the Seattle aquarium. As far as the set-up I have an overflow box which leads to my pump and then the water from the pump is split 2 ways: about 65% of the water is routed to a Berlin protein skimmer, the other 35% of the water is routed to a pipe which drops down into the tank, and it has small holes drilled into it to create more water movement, in addition to that I have 3 small electrical water pumps that stick to the side of the tank and push water around.

Stang Man

Do you have a sump? If not I would strongly suggest that you purchuse one as soon as you can a cheap and easy way is to purchuse a tank to fit under the stand but will need some modifing to function properly. This can be done fairly simply if you can do the DIY selfer stuff!

locoyo386

Well it will depend on what you plan to keep. The amount of nitrates will determine how often and how much water needs to be changed. If you are going to have a reef tank than the frequency and amont is different than if you are only planing on keeping fish. On my 10 gallon tanks I let the nitrates stay around 80-160. How fast they reach 160, determines how fast I do the water change (I do 50% to reduce my nitrates by 50%). The way the water change can vary from person to person aswell. My opinion (if you are not going reef) would be that at the moment your tank is fine, thus maybe 10 gallons per moth would be ok.

I am curious, what do you have for mechanichal filtration other than the protein skimmer?

charzar-g

I find that i just add water as my skimmer takes it out, yes that isn't much, but i have a large tank and my skimmer fills every 2 days, so its like taking lots of small rather than one big.
I doubt anyone else would follow my advice though - but so far, i've had nothing die!