Salinity in a freshwater tank

Hi,

If you only replace evaporated water in a freshwater tank, how salty will the water get?

Also, wouldn't brine shrimp as food increase the salinity in a tank?

 

huh? In a fresh water tank your doing WC, no way around them. Weekly. It would take a very long time for any amount of salt to build in general.

 

There shouldn't be any salt in the tap water in the first place, so unless you're adding some, there shouldn't be any salinity.

I don't think brine shrimp would increase the salinity that much at all, unless you're drastically overfeeding and it's sitting at the bottom of the tank.

Can you describe the tank? There are very few situations in which merely topping off evaporated water is acceptable; by and large water changes are mandatory. (I know JerI tops off her RCS bowl, but it is very heavily planted, and RCS have a very low bioload.)

 

tuche

 

I started typing before you posted! I in no way meant to contradict you. Really, I think that's the only instance I know of someone topping off a tank. I still do water changes on my RCS tank.

 

Oh no, you made a good point, I was thinking of a tank with fish in it, didnt even think about an invert tank.

 

I started typing before you posted! I in no way meant to contradict you. Really, I think that's the only instance I know of someone topping off a tank. I still do water changes on my RCS tank.

I don't do WCs on my tanks, but they're heavily planted, over-filtered and I leave a margin of error when stocking. I just replace evaporated water. About once every other month I do a quick vac on my 55gal to make it look pretty (remove any undissolved solids), but other than that, my tanks are insanely low maintenance. Not something I would recommend for anyone else, but it works for me.

To the OP, even if you're adding aquarium (not marine) salt to the tank, no salinity is going to be built up. Also, brine shrimp have such a negligible amount of salt in them that they don't add salinity to your tank unless your tank is absolutely overflowing with them...and even then it's iffy.

 

my tank is so heavily planted that when I open the lid, it smells fresh. Eventually I'm hoping that I can run this thing without even a filter and let the clams and plants take care of keeping it clean.