planted discus tank - how often do you do water changes?

[hooha]

I'd like to get a feel for how often people with planted discus tanks (e.g. Phil Edwards - beautiful tanks!!!) do water changes. I posted a question about cleaning food/poop off the bottom of a tank daily and replacing the water less-than-daily in the Beginner's forum and got some pretty cold responses :-\ I'll do daily water changes in a BB to grow out the discus, but i'm thinking theoretically it would be harder to keep "plant" paramaters (K, nitrates, Fe, etc) in a good range with daily changes ( lemme know if I"m wrong). Not to mention, theoretically it would be less necessary in a planted tank for daily wc's (again lemme know if i'm wrong).

This is my current plan:
1) set up a heavily planted tank, let it establish and grow out with cory's, oto's, some shrimp, and (maybe) cardinals/rams.
2) get discus, grow them out in a BB with daily water changes (I'd be happy with 5 inches in size)
3) add discus, enjoy the bliss

If everyone still does daily water changes in a planted tank, I'll do them as well. If I can do fewer water changes, better yet.

But I'd like to hear from people successful with keeping both plants and discus together for their personal experiences.

Thanks!

[xen]

Heya Hooha,

I'm about 2 months into my first planted tank experience. Certainly I'm no Phil Edwards, but I thought I'd share my experiences ;-)

I'm doing it the other way around. I'm raising my juveniles in there, doing 50% / day wc's, and gradually building up the plant levels over time. I'm making the discus' welfare my priority (obviously).

Right now it's lightly-moderately planted. That way I can still get to about 60-70% of the gravel for regular cleaning.

The discus are growing like champions - always hungry, and seem to be very happy.

My problem so far has been algae - it builds up very quickly in that tank. I recently added 3xSAEs, and some faster-growing plants to compete for nutrients with the algae. That's helped immensely, but a lot of manual cleaning of plants is still necessary.

I'm in the lucky position of telecommuting, so spending a lot of time on this tank isn't really a problem. But it's certainly taking a lot more work with an BB would be.

Cheers!
John

[shalu]

your plan is currently what I am doing: I have a 100g "hi-tech" planted tank established for over a year, recently re-scaped for discus: a large glosso lawn for open swimming space. I am using Liquidoser to make daily dosing more consistent and added a complete algae eating crew. Finally I have algae under full control(have to look hard to find any), haven't even wiped front glass for over a month. The 100g currently only houses two discus(LFS runts), plus lots of other fish. Just got my discus from Cary and put them in 55g bare bottom to grow out. I only do 30% weekly changes on 100g, but will be doing a lot more for the grow out tank. For the 100g, my long term plan is, slowly reduce nutrient dosing and increase fish load. In the end, discus poop will provide all the nutrients (Diana W.'s method :) ). With my current fish load, I already stopped NO3 dosing and I seem to have a constant level of 5-10 ppm. When I had fewer fish, I had to dose lots of NO3.

[rdeis]

I've been doing 10% weekly, and it's not enough. Nitrate is hovering at 10-20ppm now that everyone is out of quarantine. I'lm increasing this week. To get an idea of the plant load, here's pics: http://forum.simplydiscus.com//index.php?board=7;action=display;threadid=17301

There are several more discus in there now, all fairly small, to go with 3 SAE, 6 Otocinclus, and 1-3 amanos. No brown or green spot to speak of, but a fair amoung of fuzz on the glass-- nothing on the plants. Also the lily and vals are growing like wildfire. I'll have to put up another pic soon.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been toying with using different ferts to see their affect on algea. It's interesting, but way too early to draw any conclusions.

[jules]

I change 15% 3x weekly.

I have a little red algae on the slower growing plants(no C02)

Just had a mated pair lay eggs.

[Harriett]

Hooha: his is a long post, apologies!
I have a 180g fairly heavily planted discus tank that has been going for 2 years now. For what it's worth, here's what I did when getting started:
Planted heavily from the git go, leaned heavily on fast growers while the tank matured and got in balance, and slowly switched over (and of course I'm still messing around with new plants from time to time) to my more permanent picks: heavy on crypts, anubias, swords, etc and still keeping some stem plants going (ambulia, wisteria, etc).
I didn't add any fertilizers the first several months while plants got established, but kept the light cycles to about 9 hours, adding time very slowly up to the present 11-12; Co2 injection from the beginning. Eventually I began working with macro and trace nutrients until I found the levels that work in my tank.
When the tank finished cycling (using the 'fishless method'), I threw in the cleaning crew--SAEs, otos, cories, bristlenose plecs and didn't feed them for several weeks---they dealt well with the new tank algae wars that came and went for several months. Later I threw in 2 dozen QTed cardinal tetras.
At the same time I started on my first batch of discus babies--kept them in QT for about 3 months in a BB tank to get some size on them. They were locally got and Cary helped me get through a few minor health situations that I didn't know how to field.
I wanted to get the discus into the tank before they were very large because I had been told that if they grew up with small dither fish they wouldn't tend to consider them lunch later, which appears to be true in my tank--the oldest discus are now about 20 months old and 6 1/2 or better inches and they never have bugged the little guys.
What I found successful in my tank:
1. Plant like there's no tomorrow for a true biofilter to develop in the tank. See what likes to grow and experiment.
2.Overfilter: I have a big wet/dry with lots of filter pads where applicable--in the w/d and in the double prefilter; and I use a Mangnum HOT 24-7 for micron filtering). The wet dry has a spray bar that originally was at the top and now is at the bottom pushing return water up the back wall and across the top of the tank.
3. A plentiful clean up crew is essential.
4. I trained all fish to feed from cone feeder(s) that I enlarged some holes in so that whatever I fed (live/frozen/pellet) would stay in one general area; this made it easy to contain falling food where the fish could see it and clean up--one of the few places not planted is the area right under the cones. Also makes feeding time less nuts because the food doesn't get swept away by the filtration in the tank before everybody gets to finish eating. Between the discus and the cleaning crew, there isn't any left over food to rot and spike the nitrates. I do not feed beefheart; it turns the tank to soup.
5. Build up fertilizer usage slowly and watch for changes--easier to back off a small problem than a landslide. Check levels in the tank regularly to see what's happening.
6. Understock the discus. I know I can stuff 20+ discus but it's not the effect I want in the showtank, so I keep it lower--no more than about 10-14.
When I add fish, I watch the balance in the tank. I still end up adding a small amount of potassium nitrate weekly to keep the nitrate level up because the plants utilize what the fish poop out.
7. I change 60-70% of the water weekly and do a good vacuuming of the substrate. I rinse the prefilter pads about every 1-2 days and then at cleaning do the pads in the w/d and HOT.
I read most of the new posts on Simply pretty much daily and I know what I do isn't the way it's done by many, but my own experimentation has been successful and it's a happy beautiful tank that brings my family and me enormous pleasure---it's working great, so here is one story way far on the dark side!
Best regards, Harriett

[jules]

Without C02 - my Swords, Crypt and Red Tiger Lotus grow very slowly.

Harriett: Do you have any pictures of your 180G?

[ChloroPhil]

Hooha,

You've got exactly the right idea, stick with it and you'll have loads of success.

As for WC, I do 50% approx. every three days, or whenever the sump starts running low.

Thanks for the comments!

Best,
Phil

[Harriett]

Jules
I'm woprking on getting a pic up--no digital camera but I think I can work around that now...(Phil, I KNOW I owe you a pic and promised it a good while ago..so sorry!)

I also found my red lotus and crypts grew really stinky when my CO2 ran out and I didn't get it refilled for more than a week....
Harriett

[DiscusFevaa]

I recently just had discus and I have a planted tank, I used to do 2 25% water changes in a week, but I've noticed that my juvenilles are more happier to frequent water changes. I change my routine from twice a week to every other day which i vacuum and wipe the walls everytime. Would this have an impact to my plants and the biofilter? BTW i have a pleco, 2 corys, and 2 blue rams in the tank, but offcourse my first priority is to raise my Discus....

[hooha]

thanks guys for the replies!

I've noticed the near-fanaticism of the two sides between bb and planted tanks for discus. It's quite interesting. At least I'm glad there was positive response here. I was getting kinda discouraged with Simply after posting in the beginner's forum. Maybe they thought they were being helpful but posts along the lines of "no that won't work. Here, look at some African Cichlids" or "frankly, you should look at something else besides discus" are pretty off-putting.

xen
I was thinking of doing that - doing more water changes in the planted tank - but was concerned about how it would affect the plant nutrients. Also, doing 50% daily water changes in a 29 gallon is alot easier and less time consuming than in a 75 gallon. Post pics if you can!

Harriett
thanks for the info, i'm going to get a worm feeder when i order my equipment. It's definitely encouraging to hear people's success stories with planted discus tanks.

I didn't realize there were threads in the biotope forum with pics....gotta browse through the entire section now :)

One thing that I would like to see more is updates of how things go along. Setting up a planted tank is so dynamic, it's helpful to see how things progress and how adversity is addressed. On some of the other planted aquarium forums they have "journal" threads with updates every so often on how the tank had grown out and how things were changed. Would the moderators/board owners here allow that?

Reading through everyone's posts, i'm thinking of starting with 2-3x/weekly water changes when I finally add discus to my planted tank and adjust from there. One of the issues is that I won't be able to have a container for aging water any larger than 20 gallons or so. Adding from tap will probably change the temp (and to a lesser extent pH) too drastically to keep the discus happy.

[ChloroPhil]

On some of the other planted aquarium forums they have "journal" threads with updates every so often on how the tank had grown out and how things were changed. Would the moderators/board owners here allow that?


Absolutely! In fact, I'd encourage everyone to do the same. I'm perpetually amazed at the changes in my aquascapes over time. Occasionally I'll go back and see a picture from a year ago and see a totally different tank than I remember it being. It's definately a good learning tool.

Best,
Phil

[Don_Lee]

Great information Harriett! Now all that we have to do is convince you to share pics of your tank with the world.....I know the pictures I saw a year ago or so were AWESOME! :o

Don ;D

[M0oN]

I've got a 29 gallon bow front, only do 3 gallons a week, somtimes twice, depending on how much spare time I have...fish are spawning and plants are growing...

[Harriett]

Don!
Thanks for the praise; I am working on getting pics up of the tank very soon.
Best regards,
Harriett

[RAWesolowski]

Hoo,

I have two planted tanks. The 36 bow has crypts, aponogeton, anubias and hygro. Water changes are 50%, 4 x a week. Tank is maintained at 84F with 7.6 Ph, 350 TDS, no CO2 and receives 1 milliliter of Flourish with every change.

Quick shot from today.

[RAWesolowski]

Roght side of tank has mopani wood that is the discus hangout.

[RAWesolowski]

Clean-up crew consists of cories, oto, CAE, bristlenose and rams. Tank king from Joe Szelesi at Enchanted Discus.

[RAWesolowski]

If everything is OK by the fish...

[RAWesolowski]

Or...

[hooha]

RA

did you grow those discus out in the planted tanks? They're nice-sized for sure if you did.

[ronrca]

Nice pics and beautiful tank/discus! Thanks for sharing! ;)

[ChloroPhil]

Way to go Bob! Those are some great fish. Your tank looks cool too, I like the strong vertical feel. Keep us updated on the fry, that's going to be a killer combination.

Best,
Phil

[RAWesolowski]

Hoo,

Bought the fish at that size. I will only grow fish out in a bare bottom. My thoughts are that the heavy feeding needed to bulk up the fish would make it much too difficult to keep a planted tank tidy. The blue pigeon is from Joe Szelesi at Enchanted Discus and the Gray pigeon is from Jim Dvorak in Chicago.

Phil & Ron,

Thanks for you kind comments. No worry on the fry as I will not need to buy another tank or feed the parents after this spawn. First time is never a charm!