[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[APD] Re: CO2 Questions




However, depending upon the volume of water, you would you not have to
inject more CO2 than can be disolved at only one point?

Nope, won't happen. If you have a very low-efficiency CO2 reactor you might find that you can't maintain the pH level you want though. All you'd need in a common filtration system would be a larger CO2 reactor capable of handling the load you present to it. I would suspect one of the counter current power head driven units would work well in such an application. The water circulation in a centralized system will distribute the CO2 concentration over the entire water volume of the system, so you won't reach saturation at any one point until you saturate the entire system.


In any common filtration system what you're really doing is bringing all the normally distributed hardware you use to maintain the environment(s) in your aquaria and centralizing it all. This means instead of thirty 50 watt heaters you maybe only need one 1000 watt heater. And instead of 30 small powerheads, you maybe only need one centrifugal pump. What you are doing is arranging your equipment such that you achieve economies of scale (must... not... talk about work... In telecommunications this is *all we do*). A single 1000 watt heater will be more economical to operate than will thirty 50 watt heaters, and it will likely do a better job too. Also, reliability is improved with using a single large unit over many small units (in terms of failures over time, not tolerance of failures -- they are two different metrics!).

A centralized system has one major advantage or disadvantage, depending on what you are trying to achieve: water chemistry in *all* tanks will be kept very nearly identical since the water volume is effectively shared with all other tanks. If you are trying to keep the same types of fish/plants in every tank, this will make it easier and also make the system more stable chemically due to the larger water volume, and it will simplify maintenance (one massive water change handles all 30 tanks at once).

The disadvantage is that all the tanks will have near identical water chemistry -- you wouldn't be able to keep one tank's water chemistry different from the others without removing that tank from the centralized system. Also, you *really must* quarantine *everything* new before introducing it into the system since the centralized system has the one major drawback of being capable of quickly spreading disease from one tank to *all* the others, automatically.

-Bill


***************************** Waveform Technology UNIX Systems Administrator

_______________________________________________
Aquatic-Plants mailing list
Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com
http://www.actwin.com/mailman/listinfo/aquatic-plants