Hi - I recall a conversation re: pros and cons on water changes. I did a search and can't find anything so I decided to start a new thread.
I opened my pond Feb 27th and did a 20-25% water change. It seems some people on the forum say they're pretty much not necessary, something that I can't really wrap my arms around. For 24 years I've done water changes every 2 weeks, maybe 3, but usually 2 weeks at most. Last year I did a couple of pp treatments. The water looked and stayed like glass aside from the fact the water parameters were perfect. I did fewer water changes with no problem.
So this year, it's now 5-6 weeks since a water change, but it's still cool with much less feeding and I'm wondering. Being my water looks fine, the testing parameters are perfect, should I do a 10% changes to at least backwash the bead filter.
The media looks perfect through the see through top.
My other thought was parasites and bacteria. They're there, we all have them but won't water changes keep the level down or is it enough to assume with good water quality and healthy fish, whatever is lurking in the water isn't going to matter? Why do we do water changes? If something is off we might do a change but I always thought it was reduce the level of aeromonas and pseudomonas along with other predators that could attack our fish. Beside, they multiply so how do we keep them at bay without changes?
Any thoughts?
Howdy
@barryian !! I haven't read the other posts here yet... Just sharing my perspective.
Some areas seem to have no issues with keeping glassy clear water whereas other areas a different story. My pond water tends to stay glassy clear for a while... until... Wind blows like crazy, organic deposits carried by wind or birds or whatever start to increase like crazy, then tanins start to discolor the water along with quite a bit of floating particulates. In time, the water eventually starts to get glassy clear again and then the process repeats... Due to a leak somewhere in my underground piping or liner, this forces me to keep a slow "top off" from my water source once every 3 days or so. Fortunately, my small pond is surrounded by large elm tries, pines, and some other trees so I figure the leaking water is not going to waste.
Unless there is significant accumulation of pollution in the water or wanting to remove water discoloration... then I wouldn't bother doing water changes. Properly formulated fish food will have all of the trace minerals, vitamins, and nutrition the fish will need.
If not a hassle and pond is designed more like a watergarden rather than a nishikigoi pond, I would on occasion, once a month, do some spot vaccuming in the pond. Not everything, just a bit here and there to try to keep the heterotrophic microbes in check.
Lately I have been doing more in aquaculture, rather than ponding, but each share the same concerns. Aquaculture has witnessed some odd occurrences of sick fish when heterotrophic bacteria are not kept in check. So, to be "better safe than sorry", they often analyze their bio-filter media for heterotrophic bacteria population and, on an occasion, do a severe boil or rush of water to knock off excess biofilm when the heterotrophic population gets too high. Trickle towers are tougher to address so they use a particular media, that has a good angle on it to easily encourage sloughing, and a lower than usual specific surface area. I will have to dig further into my research notes to get more specific, but this is the general jest.
From what I understand, infections from aeromonas/pseudomonas are secondary ailments, either caused by a parasite or fish scraped by something or something else.
Is there something that can be done to reduced these secondary ailments? I don't know... but seems like nishikigoi folk are convinced that PP helps and aquaculture tries to keep a clean environment along with sterilizing tanks if there is an outbreak.
For water gardeners though, much like organic gardeners, there is the thought of a variety of beneficial organisms acting "anti-pathogenic" (for lack of a better word on my part) to help keep these secondary ailments in check.
I do my best, but, unless there is just all of a sudden a massive fish kill, I just let nature figure out the rest for my little rock water garden pond, and I just toss the dead fish into my compost pile.
If you're one of those nishikigoi fellas with fish no less than a $200 price tag on each of them, then I would keep on doing what you have been doing since it seems to be working for ya.
