Efficiency of constant flow W/C

[B-O-F]

Just wondering about this while planning my fish house. :)

If I do a manual 50% water change I know I am replacing 50% 'polluted' water with fresh water.

If I do the same thing with a constant flow system then surely I do not get that do I ?

Unless I am working it out wrong ( quite probable :) ) then no matter where in the system I take water out and feed the constant flow in I am not going to get better than 25% actual change..... and even that is debatable. ( because you are dumping a percentage of 'fresh' water at the same time )

Am I missing something somewhere ?

[kaceyo]

Your right. You would be removing more old water by doing a 50% wc rather than using a drip to add the same amount of water. I've never used a drip, but I'd think that the advantage, if there is one, would be in the stability of the tank water.

Kacey

[pcsb23]

Something to consider too with a drip system is the added heating costs, also you would need to run it through an HMA filter or similar, it still has to be dechlorinated etc...

[B-O-F]

Thanks guys. I was thinking of running it through a filter and into some kind of heat recovery system to part warm it and then feed it in somewhere in the filter system so it combines before going through an inline heater.

This whole planning a fish room thing is making my head hurt :) What originally sounded fairly simple gets awfully complicated when you start looking at stuff in more depth.

[calihawker]

This is something I was considering on my tank. Am still considering it actually. My tap water is super soft and maybe I can just run it through a carbon filter to strip the chlorine. On my 300 gallon tank I guess I need to exchange about 50 gallons a day? What do you think?

Steve