The Krib
Plants
CO2
|
The Krib
Plants
CO2
|
[E-mail] | |
| |||
| |||
What with all the stories exploding fermenter bottles and rocketing CO2 tanks, you may want to consider another CO2 source---yourself. You breathe out two or three percent CO2 all the time, and it can be collected and bubbled into the tank with an airstone. I breathe into a plastic garbage bag, and then pump the air into my plant tanks every other day. The pH typically goes down to 6.5 to 6.7. One bag does 3 fifteen gallon tanks. The CO2 is free, and you can't overdose your tanks, at least, I have never seen any ill effects on livebearers and zebrafish. Think about it! Paul Krombholz
Hoa writes: >You meant you were serious? It seemed like such an inefficient way of >injecting CO2, considering the low concentration of CO2 in your breath. >It must be a very big bag of air you use. How long does it take to fill it >with your breath? And you are not just injecting CO2, but O2 and N2 >(mostly). How do you deal with undissolved gasses? (I don't have the >original posting anymore and I can't remember what you used for the reaction >chamber.) I'm sorry if I had offended you, but I thought you were joking. ;-) > Yes, I am serious. The method really works well. From one four inch plant I have produced,in two years, a bushel (I am not exaggerating!) of Anubias nana which I sold for $80.00 at a tropical fish store. They were grown underwater in a 75 gallon tank. It takes me 4 to 5 minutes to blow up a bag. I do it while stepping up and down from a chair to increase my CO2 production. If it did it while sitting down, it might take 15 to 20 minutes. A bag does three fifteen gallon or one 55 gallon, or even one 75 gallon tank for two days. The rate of bubble production by the plants does not seem to fall off until the third day. I knew that using low percentage CO2 works because I grew aquatic plants for my master's degree research under algae-free (almost sterile) conditions in flasks, and I found that bubbling the flask with 1% CO2 produced very rapid growth which was limited by the light intensity, rather than the CO2 supply. The method of delivery is through an airstone. I have an air pump enclosed in a small bag with the electric cord and air tube coming out of one end. I attatch the tube from the big bag that I blew up to the other end and use the pump to empty the big bag into my tanks. I don't know the volume of the big bag, but I can find out if you are interested. The open end is bunched around a 1/2 in diameter tube and tied with rubber bands, and, therefore, the volume is less than the value stated on the box. I once had some dry ice, and I threw some pieces in my 55 and let them lie on the bottom, bubbling away until they were gone. I was surprised how many pieces I had to throw in before the pH got down to 6.5, which is what I get with my breath. The O2 in the bag may be 2 or 3 percent lower than in atmospheric air, but I havn't seen any ill effects on fish or anything else. The N2 in the bag should be essentially the same as that in atmospheric air, and so it should not change the amount of dissolved N2 in the water. It works for two reasons, I think. One is that atmospheric air has .003% CO2, and, if you increase it to 3%, you are increasing the concentration by 1000. Since CO2 is fairly soluble in water, such an increase would allow a big increase in the amount in solution. The second reason is that a person puts out quite a lot of CO2. I read somewhere that a resting adult puts out as much heat as a 100 watt light bulb. When exercising, as I do when stepping on and off the chair, the metabolic rate can be 10 to 15 times higher. I wrote this up in the Aquatic Gardener back around 1991 or so. I can get you the reference, if you are interested. Paul Krombholz
Roland Tan <roltan-at-singnet.com.sg> wrote:
: How do you make co2?
: Is there a site to this?
I think someone already gave a one answer (sugar and
yeast produce co2 which is piped to the aquarium), but I'd
like to suggest an alternate.
I'd suggest a simple mouthpiece and valve combination, so
that anyone watching the aquarium may pipe his co2 to the
plants:
##### | |
|c .| | <(((=< |
| \ | |
| ==={}=========| }} }{ |
-| |- | } { { |
-----------------
Isnt' there a Japanese name for inventions that are once
practical and useless?
John
The method was written up in The Aquatic Gardener 4(3) and TAG 4(4), but that was a long time ago. I can do three 15 gallon tanks or one 75 gal with one bag. With the tanks covered tightly with glass, it lasts about 2 days, and then the rate of bubble production starts to drop. I don't have any kind of water circulation at all and almost never get bluegreen algae take-overs. I don't think that CO2 additions encourage or discourage bluegreen algae. If the BGA gets bad, I just turn off the lights and wait until the snails eat it up. In poor light the algae becomes palatable for ramshorn or pond snails (or guppies) and they finish it up in a week or so.
This method of delivering CO2 is what I think of as REALLY DIY CO2, and, compared to a yeast culture, a person really cranks it out. Just resting, an adult is producing the energy equivalent of a 100 watt bulb. The CO2 is a lot more convenient to diliver if you have the air stones and air tubing for the tanks set up permanently and you just attach the bag of exhaled air to the pump and turn it on with a timer set to about 40 minutes, which is, for me, about the length of time it takes for the pump to empty the bag. The pump for delivering the exhaled air is in a small bag with a hole cut in the corner, and I stick the tube from the air bag into the hole and tie it on tight with a rubber band.
![[Sketch]](co2gen.gif)
Ken Cova wrote:
Not necessarily. Exhaled air contains roughly 3.5% CO2. I don't know what the percentage is in the yeast CO2 reactors; it could be over 50%, but the amount in the tank is due to the rate that the mix gets bubbled into the tank. If you collected all the gas from a yeast reactor and pumped it into the tank with an air pump, you might get too much CO2 in and kill the fish. Exhaled air, on the other hand seems pretty safe. I have never seen it cause distress in guppies or zebra danios, which is all the fish I have.
Paul Krombholz, where our month-long drought was broken in dramatic fashion yesterday and today.
|
|
||
 |
|
||
Up to
CO2 
Plants
The Krib
|
This page was last updated 30 July 2000 | ||