Water Changes

[SkiptomyLou]

I'm still planning out my tank and haven't set it up yet but I have a question about water changes. I know that I would probably get into a schedule a changing out a few gallons every week in order to keep the water quality at its best.

The way I want to aquascape is kind of cave shaped (I've seen a picture of it on this site somewhere) - namely to build up near the surface as well as create a base type cave area down below.

My question is this - when I do a water change and the level of the water lowers, it is likely to go lower than my top rock and corals. Is this ok? Can the corals be out of the water for those few minutes before I put new water in? If not, how else would I do this.

Thanks!

 

[dragon79]

I usually move my corals down a bit, if the water goes down to where it exposes them to air, then when I bring the water level up. Ideally I have everything aquascaped and everything positioned so that when I do water changes it does not expose the corals to air. If there is something wrong where i need to do more than my average change, that's when I have to move corals.....hope this helps a bit.

 

[djconn]

When I do water changes, in all three of my tanks, some rock and coral is exposed to air. This is not something that you want to happen a lot and it is stressful to your corals but it really can't be avoided in my tanks. The amount of time, in all honesty, is very short because I have my make-up water ready to go. Its probably somewhere between 20secs to 2 minutes that rock/coral is exposed to air.

In some tidepool ecosystems, corals are exposed to air naturally with rising/falling tides, etc. I've witnessed this myself in Central America where I've seen small patches of zoanthids and mushrooms in and out of water for short amounts of time. Bottom line is I've been okay with this method in my tanks for over two years without a problem. You should be fine if you keep the duration to a minimum.