Hi everybody, I'm going to show you today on the Dangerous Fish Bowl channel a few techniques that you can use to avoid fish deaths during water changes. Now obviously we all have to use declorinator or so-called declorin or remove chlorine from tap water, but water changes can be a lot more complicated than that and I've learned the hard way, meaning I've lost fish, trying to figure out what went wrong in some cases so I want to share what I learned. So first of all, this is a Python, basically it's a gravel siphon, you can get this from a bunch of different companies. So basically you'll notice that if you imagine this bucket as a fish tank, you'll notice that I have it angled up and I've set it into the corner so it's mechanically stable. Why am I doing that? Well because if I were to lay it down on the gravel or I would invert it and shoot the water into the gravel, then basically all the water coming out would be virgin tap water. So what we want is we want time for the declorator to work, but more importantly we want to prevent fish from swimming up in here for fun and exercise as I've seen many of them do during the water change. The reason for that is that basically the way that ammonia or chlorine toxicity, let's just call it tap water toxicity, works in fish and again I found this out the hard way, is not that it kills them immediately. They'll swim up in there and they'll look just fine and you won't think there's a problem and then half an hour and hour later they'll suddenly keel over dead. They might flop around for 10 minutes but it ends pretty quick. The way to avoid that is to make sure that they cannot go up into this gravel siphon while you're changing the water. So if it's set against the corner like this and you might fix it to a rock or something on the bottom to really stabilize it, make sure it doesn't tip over during the water change because a fish bomb sitter, because of buoyancy issues or whatever. Basically if you are shooting all the water into the corner, it'll spray out and mix with the existing water and the tank but it'll do it in a much more diluted way which really reduces the odds of having fish deaths. The other thing is you can notice there's a valve here, you turn it on and off. Basically this controls the water flow and you can sift this on the edge of the tank as kind of an added stability. If somebody who makes this kind of thing is watching, definitely we need a way to clip this on the side of the tank because this is a real pain the way it is. If you don't hang this on the side of the tank, the whole hose will shoot out and water will fly over the floor to disaster. By the way, don't mess with this unless you really know what you're doing. I accidentally disabled it at one point and then turned on the water and you can imagine what happened when I finally turned it back the other way to the open position. But anyway, the other thing that I need to remind you about is water depth, specifically the depth of the water change. What I'm talking about is, for example, 25% would be 25% of the way down from the top to the gravel. 100% water change would be all the way to the gravel when I was there that would kill the fish. An ongoing question is how much is a sufficient water change and how much is the maximum safe water change? The answer is it really just depends. If your water is in excellent condition and you're just trying to change out a little bit of water, 20% might cut it. On the other hand, if you're just starting a new aquarium and the ammonia is out of control or you've got sediment coming from a pannis filter or something, then you might need to do a lot more than that. Now I've actually changed 95% using this technique and I've never lost a fish as long as I've used this technique. But I don't recommend that simply because you have to remember if nothing else, there's going to be a thermal shock if there's a difference between your tap water and your tank water. You just have to be careful. Obviously, there is still some time required even if you use this technique for chlorine and ammonia to get neutralized. Except in really weird emergencies, I don't recommend anything more than 75%. That would be my maximum water change, I think. But again, your maximum might be only 50 depending on the differences in parameters between your tap water and your tank water. The bottom line is certainly if you're going to do a very deep water change, trickle the water in very slowly first until you get up to 20-25% full because then you've got some backstored to dilute the new water. You don't want to shock your fish. You want to be very mindful of that. Bottom line, look at your fish and two of your tank. Are they freaking out? Are they turning pale? Are they hanging out at the surface, gasping for air? Those would all be pretty bad signs. But basically, when I put the declor in, so here's my declor, I just basically would use the amount that I need for the entire tank. I tend to use two, sometimes three times a dose just because I have heavy chlorine and moanier problems. I would fill a couple of cat foals depending on the size of my tank. I would pour it directly into this siphon here before turning on the water. The second I turn on the water, I already have the entire dose I need for the entire water change going on. Basically, at that point, the water and the declor and the moanier removal are going to be able to mix much more effectively. Now let me just show you something here. This is the other end of this thing. This actually comes with a plastic interposer by default that connects to your plumbing. I actually replaced that with this bronze interposer that I got from a plumbing store. I think Python actually has a bronze version that you can buy. Depending on the exact hose out litter, the sink you're attaching to, you may need to change this, but I do recommend bronze not plastic because the plastic strips out and falls apart. The last piece of advice I'll leave you with, trust me, do not leave the house while you're doing the water change. That's all for me today. Take care folks. Bye bye. Alright, now let's try again. I just want to show you a couple of things. One is this is how I drain the water. As you can see, I've got the hose flowing into an overflowing little glass jar. The interposer on the hose is suspended and entered to above the bottom so that any fish that gets sucked up can easily swim out of the hose and into the jar. They don't get stuck in the end of the hose. The hose is also deep enough into the jar. It's not going to flip out. I can't tell you how many times this has saved me from losing fish down the drain. Hey folks, let me show you what I'm doing here. This is what I call an inline water change. Inline meaning that the filter is still inline while I'm changing the water. What's significant about this is that it allows me to prevent the problem of detritus spewing into the tank when you turn the filter back on. Unless you clean your filter perfectly well, there's always some loose detritus in there. Basically when you reconnect it and power it back on, it takes this big chunk of crap and basically spews it into your water that you just changed and defeats the whole purpose. By keeping it engaged, keeping it inline while you're doing the water change, you can avoid this whole problem. Now obviously, I can only go so deep. I can't get deeper than just above the top of that intake down there. Otherwise I'm going to lose the scythe in and the whole thing is going to go wrong. I'm going to stop it at that point and frankly that's 75%. For me, that's a major change anyway. I don't want to go further than that for a lot of other good reasons. You can see that this basically also helps to aerate the tank and it helps to get the declar and the ammonia remover circulating. The other thing is that the reason I'm able to do this is that I'm using a pumice filtration. Basically, my pumice filter on my hex tank, my root veil hex tank, was going five months before the last time I had to service it. But that filter was done with finer grain pumice that tends to clog up the impeller after a while. This particular filter, as you can see in another video that I'm going to link in the description, this particular filter was assembled and you can see the entire assembly process. It was assembled with what I call perma pumice as impermanent pumice. It's about three eighths inch down to a quarter inch granules. It's much better for sustaining water flow over the long term. I'm hoping to get a full year out of this. If not, maybe never have to maintain it at all until the impeller dies. We'll see. I just thought I'd show you this technique. By the way, I'm sucking the water out through my Python hose. You can actually see it's kind of, you can see it down there. It's sort of buried in the gravel because I don't want to get fish into it. Of course, I got my jar set up in the bathtub in case that happens. But remember, when I refill, I'm going to mount it in the corner and I'm going to do the corner flow injection like I showed you previously. It looks like I'm going to have to stop this in a few seconds because I'm about to lose the siphon there on the intake. By the way, just make sure, look out for the electrical issues because even though the power heads off and obviously the lights are off, technically there is a pathway that electricity could take between the motor and the canister filter and the water. This isn't totally safe, but in my personal opinion, it's safe enough. Just be careful.