My Auto water changer - Never manual wc again!

[henward]

since i have been gone - i have perfected my Auto water change.

Came across hiccups whcih i will FULLY outline in this post.

i am such an advocate on this idea that its my duty to share it to the world.

keep in mind, this idea only works in certain circumstances, but dedicated fish rooms, garages and tanks close to doors and windows, laundry or places where wanted can be expelled.

this system enables me to change water to ANY specification of % per week ratio.

It also enables me to instantly increase water change levels if i feed heavily the day before, then ic an increase it in the next few days.

the system is rudementary. simple and cheap.

No fancy electronics - though you can do that, but why if its not needed.

THis is the power house

Here is a 200l Drum, (an old olive drum by barrys barrels)

installed in it is a toilet ball cock system. This system is reliable - very reliable.

water from the outside feeds into this drum.

IN the drum is a small power head, via aqua to constantly stir the water, also a air stone dedicated to constantly aerate the water to evaporate ANY small tiny traces of chlorine (i dont use ager)

in that drum, is responsible for changing a total of 300l of water a day to 5 tanks.

i dont use a heater for the tank – because the trickle is so minute at a time, it does not have the chance to drop the temperature. The eheim jager heaters have a self check system which effectively reduces my power bill by 20 to 35% (This is measured on an average 2 week period). Self check system turns the heater on for a few mins and in that time, the heater pumps full power heat to the water, when it detects temp is ok, then it shuts off. Jagers have a very accurate t-stat and the self check will heat the water fine. Water pumped into the system is done in 15 minute blocks at approx 20 to 25 litres at a time.

The Flow is regulated by this tap, Fluval, youc an use any tap but I found fluval to be accurate and very tight so you can increase it by very small amounts if need be.

It might look like a Frankenstein, probably cos it is, but these are normal hose fittings attacked to eheim or non toxic tubing to feed water to the tanks (low pressure)

An overflow was drilled to all my tanks, ON my 2x 1200 litre tanks, it shares a sump. That sump has a hole drilled on it too to drain water.

As you can see, drain pipes on sump and the tank enables water to be pumped in the opposing side as the drain to fully mix with the water and out the other side.

On the sump, ihave a secondary filter that effectively doubles my bio filtration. The bio media in the picture below used to just be in the sump, but warren, who sold me the gravity draining sump – I modified and simply fed back into the main sump. The picture above and the below is one unit, filtering 2500 litres of water in 2 tanks.

As you can see, the green tube on the left hand side of this secondary trickle filter, is where the auto changer feeds water in.

The water is fed into the drum by a timer outside by the garden tap. Gardena timers I find reliable but I have had one fail. Watcht eh battery life also, I check this every 3 days to ensure battery is functioning.

The pumps in the drum is set on a timer – 6 dollars from any hardware store. I find that they are cheap, but even if you drop them very slightly – they stop working, so I always have 2 spare, and when you buy, to save you the trip, buy 3 more than you need, almost always, I found that there is a 10% failure rate off the shelf:D

The garden timer is timed to coincide with the wall timers pumping water in.

Example:

Wall timer turns on 1pm to 1:15pm, garden timer turns on 1:20pm for 10 minutes.

Tap is only turned quarter the way up to reduce pressure when the garden timer turns off. I always have 2 to 3 minutes margin to make sure drum is always full after a cycle.

PROBLEMS: all ironed out, messy but lesson learnt

Always check the battery on the garden timers.

Spot check the wall timers that they are the right time with your garden timer (I synchornised this as close as possible)

Manually switch on the wall timers to see if water pumps every few days to ensure timers don’t fail. Apparently sometimes they do.

The hose feeding water from the garden main to the drum MUST BE a nylon woven reinforced food grade food safe hose. I use Nylex food grade hose from mitre 10 mega. (No I don’t work for Nylex) I found their fittings and hoses are exceptional quality with exceptional price:D (I swear I don’t work for them)

DO NOT USE non toxic clear hose even eheim hose for the mains pressure feed from tap to drum – I did this and the hose enlarged 3 times it's size during off cycles and whent he barrel is full, and eventually it raptured and sprayed hundreds of litres over night in my garage:D

Non toxic low pressure hosing is ok to use for drum to tank lines. That's low pressure internal pump only.

Do not let drum run dry, I do a 5 min cycle 4am, 2 hours after the last cycle and 3 hours before the first cycle to ensure it's full. Air bubbles trapped in the feed lines may stop pumps from feeding water. The pumps are not powerful enough I found. And this will sneak up nitrate creep.

Always measure nitrate levels, once a fortnight perhaps? There is plenty of margin anyways, but it's good to be safe, maybe once a week is good.

Note:

In my 2x 1200litre tanks plus sump, I change the water about 80 to 100% if not more if I decide to feed extremely heavy that week. On my grow out tank, I change the water 120 to 150% a week – it's a 260 litre tank. On my axolotle tank probably 100% water change a week, I don’t run a goof ilter on it only internals. 3 months now, no problems since the air bubbles incident, I don’t forsee any problems from this point.

I find this keeps my nitrate below 10ppm, always about 5ppm, sometimes so minute that the colour is not even on the chart.

I feed heavily and my tanks are heavily stocked.

I will post tank pics up when my friend finishes exams with his SLR:D and will post pics so you can get an idea of my stocking.

This changer system saves me 4 hours a week – plus stress on fish. Clown loaches seems to have grown faster with this system.

I don’t use ager. But I do put 3 average coffee mug of tonic salt 3x a week to ensure that the drum has minerals etc. It's something I do that I find helps stop disease and keeps fish happy, hungry and active. Also due to large bio loads, the minerals are sure depleted witht eh filtration and so this just replenishes them back.

I buy the salt at 1.15 dollars per kilo delivered to my door.

Any questions, critique, please don’t hesitate:D

Anyone wants to discuss this further, please do! I am such an advocate of this sytem, hassle free, gravel vac occasionally but the silica sand substrate in the tank actually needs no vac. All my bottom dwellers stir it up completely!

Remember, don’t do massive amounts at one time, that will not help reduce power bills.

Needs to be gradual through out the 24/7 period.

If you wanna view tanks, let me know! Keen to show peole my set up.

[Morcs]

Woohoo Henward is back!!!

Great work as always

[dbden]

WOW!!!! This is a very good looking system am doing a simaliar system no where near as hi tech as this can i ask what sort of fish you are keeping & what is the resson for the power head moving the water around in the drum wouldnt the air stone do this enough. Im fully behind you with nylex fittings dont cheap out on fittings with mains presure bad news.

[henward]

i acutally did go cheap but got woken up one morning, 3am with a gush of water under the house...... it was outside so no big deal but still a risk of breaking.

i dont think your description of HIGH TECH is correct lol, i dotn think its really that high tech:D i would agree with high capacity. but i got a system that was high tech and created my own frankenstein version for less than third the price lol

the powerhead just moves the water around so when i put salt, it dissolves with in minutes. also just cos the garage is warm, the more movement i have in the water the warmer it gets in that short time the water is there, may be overkill but the pump is only 3 watts i think.

i keep in my grow out tank

south american banded knife

high spotted clown knife

4 pink tail chalceus

5 oddball clown loaches ( with an extra stripe, spot or no stripe)

brown ghost knife fish

(keeping frasers fish for growing for him)

1 clown knife

3 dels

[henward]

in my big tanks 2x 1200litres

1 18 inch or more red tail gold arowana

i have i think 17 large clown loaches

4 dels

1 very large ornate

1 large tt eel - i think 19 to 10 inch, its got a few on the aro.

2 palmas polli bichirs

1 albino sen (looking for a normal sen!!!)

a large 13 inch clown knife

6 inch american tiger

10 inch indo dat (approx lengths by the way)

medium sized albino oscar

2large tinfoil barbs

1 ALBINO tinfoil barb

royal plec

2 large bgks (1 is about 13 to 14 inches i think)

1x surinemensis

2x heckli chichlids

2x jurapari

7 to 8 inch 6bar distichodus

by far my most populated tank.

the fast mid swimming fish are there to distract arowana, to stop focusing on other fish. works well.

the arowana focuses on oscar and tinfoils - too fast to catch or oscar is too brave to be attacked to badly. so arowana has his h ands full and doesnt harass eel or stuff like that.

tinfoil , oscar, geophagus etc are there also as a distraction for the arowana, the arowana needs

[henward]

second 1200 litre

18 inch 1.5 red arowana

7 silver dollars (David R: that silver dollar with the swollen eye is back to normal!!)

4 spotted metynis

2 red hook metynis (biggest one is about 10 inch maybe bigger actualy)

1 very large black shark

1 medium sized albino plec

1 12 inch flagtail prochilodus

1 electric yellow african ( no one bought or took it for free)

so far the elec yellow has survived, its friend on the other hand was eaten one warm summers day:P

[henward]

as youc an see the 2 1200litre tanks are sharing the same sump and trickle system.

but i forgot to mentoin

they do share a couple of towers. filtration is big for me as i feed heaps and the fish in there is big and hungrya nd many of them.

i also have 2x fx5s full of bio media one on each 1200 litre.

1 internal fluval 4 ( to catch more particulates)

and a aqua one equivalent cf1200.

so there is much filtration in there.

[dbden]

can see your under standing on well stocked but with that much filtration and water running through there shouldnt be to much problems. you realy do like your large fish

[henward]

yes i do indeed:D

i did have amonia problems in the start, but got rid of that with increasing my bio media dramatically.

plus the fx5 helped too with the massive turn over of water.

they are also wicked on picking up particles

[phoenix44]

so what was your water bill like?

[henward]

not sure yet.

8)