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20-50% once a week, sometimes less cause I'm lazy.
Top Off twice a week whenever I do water changes on my troph tank.
Sometimes when I'm bored I do twice weekly.
Tap water through a carbon bottle with Amquel+plus
Top off with RO/DI whenever I remember to get water from thebaoster but that's only happened twice since he got the RO/DI.
Only additive I use is the Amquel+plus. Oh, I have a whole cuttlebone in my 2217 along with a media bag with about 7-8 crumpled IAL. Oh and I'm using Fluorite substrate.
anything breaking down will increase it. The stones probably is helping too.
I don't pay attention to all the numbers, I don't own any test kits and last time I took a water sample to thebaoster's house to test the GH/KH never changed colors so I stopped adding drops and testing.
My pH did drop with the IAL to about 6.0-6.4, TDS I think the last month when I did the test was back down to about 300-400
Most of the old school breeders I have read logs on don't test TDS either and honestly with all these guys that say they don't change water but only top off is pretty much lieing
There is no way in hell you can maintain a low TDS without replacing the water. TDS builds up with the decay and waste produced, even plain RO/DI water would slowly increase in TDS if kept in a plastic bottle. Taking what I have learned from my venture in High-tech reef tank you can't maintain it unless you have a method of removing the waste. With reef we had protein skimmers, anaerobic bacteria filter, water changes, algae filters etc. We have none of those other than water changes and plants in our tanks but the plants.
I really want to call BS on a lot of those guys post, aquasoil decays too since it's clay baked substrate and that alone breaking down would add to the TDS and some of those guys are posting damn near zero TDS.
Well there are things that can lower hardness over time as well, some driftwood for instance has a tendency to lower gh and kh, with soft enough tap water it is possible they could get away with just op offs for exceedingly long periods of time. It is also possible that they forgot to mention using peat in the filter. They may not even realize what they are actually doing with their chemistry. If enough people do it, some will get lucky. Still not recommended.
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