Reasons for water changes.

[fatman]

Originally Posted by NewbReefer

There was a period of about 3-4 months where i could not do water changes due to a broken jaw and was told not to lift more than 10 lbs. I only ran T5's during that 4 months and only fed the tank every other day. i had very little algae accumulate on the glass. I did not have any SPS at the time and only a few low light softies. so i do believe it can be done without water changes but you gotta have one heck of a filtration system and supplementation.

You can go months and months without killing your fish if that is what you mean. Softies also take in a lot of organic nutrients and so help with keeping some control over algae. I am sure if you had tested the water you would have found quite lot of nitrates after 3 to 4 months without water changes. These people we are talking about kept their tanks with a nitrate reading of zero without water changes.

[Bifferwine]

I can vouch for that -- with regular (10% once a week or every two weeks), my nitrates stayed below 10 (I have such a heavy fish load that I really can't ask for more). Six months without water changes (even with an awesome skimmer and daily top offs), my nitrates were at 150+, totally off the charts. Yeah, everything lived, and everything looked fine, but I wouldn't recommend that route.

[NewbReefer]

my nitrates were abit high and once i got the ok from the Doc to start lifting after my accident and started with the water changes my corals opened up more and seem much happier. The same thing happened once i got an auto top off, i would try to top off every day but sometimes it would be forgotten about for 2 or 3 days if i was really busy. once i added the auto top off my corals and fish seem even happier due to the stable salinity. it's crazy to see how much little things like that can have such a huge effect.

[fatman]

Water parameters are the first and most important key to happy fish and corals.