Reactor Fine-Tuning
No matter what kind of bubble rate I fed to my new reactor, I could not turn the drop checker color too far off of blue, and certainly not any type of yellow tint. In fact, at the end of the day, if I turned the Rio pump off, a large mass of CO2 would move up the tube, and sometimes out of the pump. There was no way in my old reactor, that that much CO2 could fail to dissolve. Something was up.
I tried posting on the APC forum, but I did not get a whole lot of help. However, this picture from another DIY thread indicates a judicious number of bio balls -- five. Considering I was using twenty, I was led to believe this might be problematic. My hypothesis is that having so many balls creates too much structure, allowing pockets of gas to form and hide from turbulent flow. Perhaps if there was a stronger pump whose flowrate overwhelmed the reactor, it would be a different story, but I believe as it stands, the Rio 600 is finding the path of least resistance around the bio balls, leaving the gas pockets alone.
Fortunately, I had enough foresight to make it relatively easy to take the reactor apart, so it was just a matter of using enough elbow grease to unscrew the bottom. I ended up dumping out 14, leaving six in, just to block the exit. I expect most of the dissolution to occur upstream of the balls now.
I now anxiously await the drop checker turning green, but not yellow. That was my one hesitation: that I was taking away the fuctionality of the fish-friendly diffusor I had inadvertantly created. It seems apparent to me that it would not diffuse CO2 quickly enough to kill fish; there was plenty of CO2 left undiffused at the end of the day, while the drop cheker was still showing blue. I was seeing signs of CO2 deficiency though (black BBA edges around some temple and amazon sword leaves), so for right now, I will moniter conditions closely, but try to boost CO2 concentration. Actually, there's probably a happy medium of number of bio balls to be found at which it will only diffuse max 30 ppm, but it would be very difficult to establish that such a configuration existed.
As an aside, I was pleased to see a few golden kuhliis squirming about the rotala indica while I was doing all this. I actually spotted at least four at the same time, so that was a reassuring sight.
I tried posting on the APC forum, but I did not get a whole lot of help. However, this picture from another DIY thread indicates a judicious number of bio balls -- five. Considering I was using twenty, I was led to believe this might be problematic. My hypothesis is that having so many balls creates too much structure, allowing pockets of gas to form and hide from turbulent flow. Perhaps if there was a stronger pump whose flowrate overwhelmed the reactor, it would be a different story, but I believe as it stands, the Rio 600 is finding the path of least resistance around the bio balls, leaving the gas pockets alone.
Fortunately, I had enough foresight to make it relatively easy to take the reactor apart, so it was just a matter of using enough elbow grease to unscrew the bottom. I ended up dumping out 14, leaving six in, just to block the exit. I expect most of the dissolution to occur upstream of the balls now.
I now anxiously await the drop checker turning green, but not yellow. That was my one hesitation: that I was taking away the fuctionality of the fish-friendly diffusor I had inadvertantly created. It seems apparent to me that it would not diffuse CO2 quickly enough to kill fish; there was plenty of CO2 left undiffused at the end of the day, while the drop cheker was still showing blue. I was seeing signs of CO2 deficiency though (black BBA edges around some temple and amazon sword leaves), so for right now, I will moniter conditions closely, but try to boost CO2 concentration. Actually, there's probably a happy medium of number of bio balls to be found at which it will only diffuse max 30 ppm, but it would be very difficult to establish that such a configuration existed.
As an aside, I was pleased to see a few golden kuhliis squirming about the rotala indica while I was doing all this. I actually spotted at least four at the same time, so that was a reassuring sight.
posted by k-maub @ 2:03 PM
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