Why I NEVER Change Water in My Aquariums! (Auto Water Change System)

hey how's it going everyone welcome back to keeping fish simple so in today's video i thought i might discuss how my automatic water change system works and how i change all the water in the fish room now obviously when it comes to fish tanks we need to change water it's a pretty commonly known fact and if you don't know that i don't know what you're doing on this video but obviously with this many tanks in the fish room i think we have 65 tanks in here there's a lot of water that needs to be maintained and changed now i used to have a fish room in my mum's old breakfast room and in that fish room i had eight tanks and all of those tanks were manually water changed so i'd actually siphon water out of those tanks and replace it with buckets and then when i decided to upgrade into this fish room to breed fish for profit and make this my job i knew that when i had this many tanks there was no way that i could actually manage all of these aquariums with me siphoning out and changing water that way with buckets and hoses and things like that just wasn't going to work so i had to come up and do a bit of research with how i was actually going to change water in this fish room and come up with some sort of automated system to change water in this fish room and in today's video i'm going to share that with you now i didn't develop this system i'm sure someone else has got it and i'm just going to give you guys a quick disclaimer that any system that you use is not going to be like a one size fits all you need to actually watch quite a few videos and do a bit of research on the water in your area to try and figure out the best way to do this now my system is going to be a really good blueprint for a lot of you guys to follow but it's not going to be the be-all and end-all because there's going to be things that you need to adjust to your system to either make it fit in your allocated area or to actually treat the water and make sure that it's safe for your fish so in this fish room i actually spend less time maintaining water and changing water than i did in my previous fish room that's because this is all automated i do manually change water in this fish room and it's only on a few tanks and it's only probably once every week or two weeks the tanks that actually do take a lot of maintenance are the discus tanks and i don't really mind doing that because the reward is worth it like i get a lot of money when i sell discus so it's worth it for them i keep all the rams on a separate system because i really like to lower that ph for breeding but i find that automatic water change systems are really good for growing out fish because growing out fish the most important thing is water quality and making sure there's no ammonia in that water and if you can have an automatic water change system it's just so worth it for anyone that's thinking about breeding fish and taking this seriously i guarantee that you will need this system because there's going to be days where you come into the fish room and you just don't want to change water you just you know you've had a long day and if you have an automatic water change system it is such a relief not having to take out the bucket and spend an extra couple of hours cleaning water when you don't want to just turning on a switch and leaving it's absolutely awesome and i can't stress enough how important it is to success and how much this has played a part in my moderate success in this fish room so without any further ado let's get into it i'll explain the whole system and i'll explain some things that i don't think are good about my system and things that i would improve if i had a different setup and things like that so yeah without any further ado let's get started so quickly to run down how this system works basically this is what i would call an overflow system so we have all of our water in the tanks the way the water gets changed is we just pump new water in that new water it comes into the aquarium and it starts to overflow out the back where that overflow water is then waste water and it's sent out to the drain and disposed of so it's pretty simple system and at first it didn't make a lot of sense to me because i thought if you're just injecting water into an aquarium it's not going to actually change the water because i thought you need to lower the level and then fill it back up the way this system kind of works is through dilution so you'll add new water that's clean and it's going to dilute the old water and make it a little bit more clean now this isn't going to be the most efficient way to change water you can definitely drain aquariums and fight a system to do that but i found this is the best one because you can't over change the water like if you empty a tank and then it has to fill back up to a certain amount and you don't have an overflow system in place then that's not going to be the best this one you can just turn on and it can go on forever as long as the water's treated and everything's safe so it's not a complicated system in that manner i did all my research and i had a look at different systems like drip systems which is an automatic water change where it's constantly dripping into water 24 hours a day i thought that could be a good idea but it didn't really seem to make sense in this room i couldn't completely control and manipulate when i wanted to do water changes and i thought that it just wouldn't be as effective as just doing the overflow system so that's another method you could use i'm not going to go into detail on that though because i don't think it's really that good of an idea there is some cons to having a overflow system and the first con is you can't adjust the water for each tank so like for instance if you want to have a tank with a ph of 6 and you have a tank with a ph of 7 and you want to alter water hardness which you're not going to need to do for grow outs hopefully but for triggering fish and raising up little babies and things like that you will this system won't work for those tanks so you will have to manually change those tanks yourself but that's just one floor another floor with my system that can be easily changed if you wanted to or thought it was necessary is the temp of the water so the temperature when the water comes in is normally less than the temperature in the tank now i've actually intentionally left this because it helps to spawn a lot of the quarries that i have or plecos that i have because i think it's been like a big cold water change and this only adjusts the water in the tank by a couple of degrees and then just warms back up so if you're in a freezing area this might be something that's necessary but for me it's not necessary and another thing that kind of sucks about my system is that there's a lot of room for error and i really have to focus on the small nitty-gritty things when i turn on my water change system to make sure i don't accidentally poison all my fish now there's a few reasons for that that we'll go into later on in the video but i think we'll go over and we'll start talking about how the water change system starts in my other room okay so excuse the darkness in this room because this is a little bit of a dungeon room but this is my other garage and this is the room where i store all my fish food in this fridge and i also keep all my worm cultures in here but i also behind me we're not going to be able to see it because it's really dark in here but i keep a big 3000 liter water tank in here and it's linked up to the tap and this is where the water change system starts now because in my municipal water supply i've got chloramines in there i need to treat my water differently so most water in people's areas is either treated with one or two chemicals and those chemicals are either chlorine or chloramines now chlorine is used in quite a lot of areas and it's actually a lot better than chloramines because chlorine doesn't last as long and it actually evaporates out of water and it's really really easy to take out of water but chloramines stay in the water a lot longer and are really really hard to filter out so you can actually just use a carbon block filter to get chlorine out of the water or you can just leave it outside for 24 hours and it normally evaporates out but for areas where the water needs to spread out and has to go a long distance a lot of people use chloramine so by the time that water gets to the end of where it needs to go and it's consumed it still has got something in there to stop bacteria and things from forming now personally in my area we've got that and that means that i can't run my water through just like a filter and straight into the aquariums like most people do i actually have to treat my water a little bit differently which is kind of annoying but i can't really do anything about it so what that means is i actually pump the water into a tank where then use water conditioner treat it and that will remove all the chloramines and make it aquarium safe and then that's pumped into the fish room and into all of the tanks now the way i do this is i use a it's like a rain bird but this thing's called like a beehive and it's basically linked up to my phone and what i do is i make sure that the pump that i use to get the water into the other fish room is turned off i then turn on the rain bird beehive thing and then it turns on the water from the tap and it fills up the tank where there's a float valve and then the float valve at the top of the tank turns off the water so the tank can't overflow and then i come in and i treat that water with water conditioner now i know it's not the best method there's a lot of other ways you could do this but like i said that chloramine would be very very expensive to filter out using like a different kind of filter like it would have cost me so much money to get that filter and it just wouldn't have been economical just for the amount of water that i was using because i'm only using 3000 litres which might seem like a lot but it's really not so that's the way i do it the float valve stops the whole thing from overflowing and it's similar to like a toilet toilets use float valves they're very very common so that's the way the water tank fills up i then leave it for a couple of hours sometimes i try and leave it for a day if i can but normally i change water every day so then to come in and turn on the water change system i have a water pump that's connected to these copper pipes which i actually got a plumber to install and i would recommend getting a plumber to install all your like structural plumbing it's really really helpful i mean there's a lot of stuff you could do personally but i think the plumber can do a lot better of a job than you can and it's yes it can be a little bit expensive to get a plumber to do it but it's definitely worth it so we've got that pump linked up it's just one of the pumps with another float valve on it i think it's for clearing flooded areas so the way it works is it's got like this float valve on top of it and when that flow valves hit the bottom it turns off the pump and that way the pump can't burn out so i plug in my pump when i want to use the water change and it'll drain the whole tank into the fish room that's how the water gets into the tank and that's how the water gets to the fish room and then that's how the water gets into the fish room and then the water comes up through this pipe that you can see here so all these copper pipes and it sends spread across the whole fish room so i'll show you guys on a video all the pipes it goes to in here now in the fish room i have a bunch of different valves so i can turn off different sections if i want to so you can see here if i want to turn off all the 20 gallon tanks in the fish room i can just switch this latch and then that means that there's not going to be any water going into these tanks it's likewise for all the other racks i can turn off each rack if i want to and that means i normally have either side switched off so basically i'm either changing water on this side of the fish room or that side of the fish room i find that pump doesn't have enough push to get water to every single tank in the fish room i mean i could upgrade that pump but it just wouldn't be really worth it because i just want to control each side of the fish room anyways i don't need to change as much water on this side because i'm not growing out fish as i do on this side so that's how the water gets in here now after the copper pipes then goes into these irrigation lines that i actually created myself i did them all up from a hardware store if you just go to your gardening section and you use a lot of the irrigation lines you can actually be really really creative and find different ways to create the systems that you want to so it's not too complicated it's pretty basic and then each tank has its own little tiny valve so i can either switch that on or off that's how the water gets into the tanks now you guys might have noticed in some of my tanks you've seen these big up pipes and those are the drainage valves for the tanks now what happens is like i was saying before the water is then pumped into the tank it's then diluted and then all of that waste water is going to overflow out the back and then it goes down underneath the tanks and finds its way out onto the street and that's basically how the water gets changed now there's a few things that i had to tweak from my system to make the system fit in this room this is only a 16 meter square garage which is a single car garage so there's not a lot of space in this fish room so there was quite a few things i needed to eat to make all these tanks fit in here now the first thing i had to do was i had to make sure the plumbing went down instead of out the back of the tank so you'll see a lot of people they like to drill the back of the aquarium and then put in their overflow there i didn't have that luxury because it would have taken too much room from the sides of the tank and it would have made these corridors so you can see i'm standing in now way too narrow like it would have been like me walking like a penguin in here it would have definitely not been workable like this fish room's already tight enough as it is that would have made it really really tight and uh i wouldn't be able to fit in here so that was the first thing so that meant that i had to put all of the drains at the bottom of the tanks that's why i bought the up pipes and it overflows down and all the plumbing's basically underneath the tanks there's no plumbing on the side of the tanks which i personally like i know it would have been a lot easier to build it the other way the other thing i made the mistake of early was not doing my drainage right you need to make sure you have a lot of grade to make sure that your water gets out because a lot of people don't talk about the drainage and the train is just super important because you're going to need to make sure the water is constantly grading downwards and can find its way out of the room that way otherwise you need to get like a pump to suck it out or something like that so all the water when it overflows is on a grade and it slopes down and goes out of the fish room that way when i first built this system i allowed enough grade but my pipes weren't big enough so i only had really really small pipes and what happened was when i was changing the water there was way too much water going into that pipe it was actually flooding the pipe before it could escape and i was just flooding the fishery i actually had to rebuild that again and that's something i definitely would recommend to everyone is to make sure that your drainage pipes are huge because otherwise you're gonna have issues that way but i think i've covered everything i want to in this video i just wanted to show you guys how the system worked because i get so many questions from people asking how my system works there's a lot of other videos on youtube where you'll see exactly the kind of parts that people use and things like that but if i was going to give you my advice i would just try and watch as many videos on this topic as possible and come up with your own method that will work i guess this video was just trying to give you guys the idea of the overflow method i think it's definitely the best method for changing water i think it's the system that most people use but it's not going to fit everyone's needs and wants so yeah thank you guys so much for watching this video i hope you guys learned something and i'll see you guys in the next one [Music]

Channel: KeepingFishSimple

Views: 57,274

Rating: 4.8554807 out of 5

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Id: l0maQZrgIpA

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021