These are some truly sad pic's.:sad2:
IMHO, you need to do one really large water change. The one percent/day water change schedule works great for routine maintenance, but it doesn't take the place of periodic larger water changes.
Lets say your system produces 100ml of contaminants per day. It really doesn't, or shouldn't, but it's a nice round number.:uhoh3: If you do a 1% water change, 99ml of contaminants will be left in the system for that day. The same thing happens on day two, three, four, and so on. The level of contaminants simply continue to rise with each passing day. The overall health of the system, and it's ability to support these delicate life forms, diminishes as time passes.
If you throw in the occasional large water change, you can cut the contaminant concentration back down to a more livable level. I view these smaller water changes similar to the way I view running a good skimmer or other efficient filtering device, or method. It's a good thing to do, but we still need to clean the system, and do larger water changes occasionally.
Testing our water is great, but we can't use the results as if it's the whole story of what's going on in our systems. There are to many substances, like protein based allelopathy, that are very hard to test for. If our animals are suffering, there's a pretty good chance it has something to do with the water they're living in. Regardless of what water testing shows.
HTH
peace
EC
