If you keep up on water changes. If I remeber correctly, you do water changes on sunday, hence the reason for you not feeding, right? How often do you test your water?

I think it was Clunkster that mentioned he changed water on Sundays. Usually it's Saturday when I change water. Roughly 20%. I've no quarms about feeding on the same day.

I rarely test my Main Tank. I sort of put trust in my observing carefully whats going on in the tank, to alert me to a problem. I've just now gone back through my diary. My last full batch of water tests was in Nov '04. I've done the odd pH and Iron test, but that's been for the Plants.

I clean the Filter every three months. It gets cleaned in tank water, never in fresh.

I have Fishy on my back about doing KH and pH tests. Now I'm probaly gunna have Funky at me for NO3 tests!

Just for the hell of it, I taught my Daughter the Nitrogen Cycle Sunday morning, and we tested the Tanks. The large Tank is 15ppm, the smaller is 10ppm.

This sort of weighs out. The smaller tank is the breeding / raising tank. A lot of food goes in there, and so it has 25% water change almost daily. The large Tank has 15-20% weekly. If I go another bucket full, that'd get me up to about 25%.

I don't like doing too frequent water changes in the large Tank, as I'm effectively just tipping my Fertilizer down the drain.

My "fertilizer" goes on the front lawn. I do a 40% water change once a week, somtimes twice a week on my 55 and the lowest nitrate I got it to was 5ppm. Usually its around 10+.

I try to do a 25% waterchange every week on my main tank, but recently upped this to 2 25% water changes per week. I also try to miss the weekend if I can since it seems the water company dumps more chlorhine and chloramines into the wate, the thinking is to keep the water right for drinking if theres any problems while staffing is lower. So if possible I go tuesday and friday right now. It seems to have worked though, with the phosphasorb and the extra water change the cynobactor bloom has all but died off now and the fish are looking better for it. Nitrates have dropped to around 15ppm from just over 20, but the taps got a 10ppm background level in it atm so looks like I want to be looking for a nitragon or RO filter soon. Rain water is out of the question as well, i live within a mile of the local amines plant and one of the biggest petrochemical processing areas in europe so forgive me if i don't want to trust it .

I dose my tank with Liquid Fertiliser as I'm trying to boost my plants at the moment. I need to hold off on water changes, to enable the Plants a chance to soak it up.

The majority of my waste water does end up in the Garden. I keep a 20litre bucket 'on tap', where the Mosquitos breed. That's good for a fish treat every so often.

My nitrates are enough fertilizer for my plants to go CRAZY!

I'm not too sure what my Plants are doing at the moment. The last few years they've been crazy. But late last year I tried an Algaecide, that completely decimated half of my Plants - I no longer have 3 of those species. The remainder just don't seem to have it in them anymore.