Co2 Confusion

[kisin]

Hi all, Hopefully someone can help.

As you may, or may not, know, I am setting up a 110L tropical planted tank, but need a little help understanding the Whole CO2 thing.

Now, I know what the CO2 is for and what it does, I'm just confused about the whole hardware side of it, such as bubble counters, diffusers etc.

So to make this simple, can anyone suggest a decent CO2 system that will fulfil my requirements?

Regards

Jake

 

[lljdma06]

Hi Jake,

Pressurized systems are not my forte since I only use CO2 for smaller aquariums.

To get you started, have a look at these articles from PARC

Back to Basics

Fire Extinguisher CO2

Equipment needed for Fire Extinguisher CO2

You might not understand everything right off the bat, but these articles give you an idea of what you'll need for a pressurized CO2 system. If you know what you need, you won't buy more than that and you can save yourself some money. Back to Basics is an important article. It'll help you decide what route you want to go with regard to planted tanks. For me, the larger the tank is, the more low-tech I will personally go, because frankly, I don't want to deal with 50% weekly waterchanges. I go about a month between changes in my low-tech planted. It is still a planted tank and the growth is lush and very healthy. Really depends on what you want.

llj

 

[kisin]

Hi Jake,

Pressurized systems are not my forte since I only use CO2 for smaller aquariums.

To get you started, have a look at these articles from PARC

Back to Basics

Fire Extinguisher CO2

Equipment needed for Fire Extinguisher CO2

You might not understand everything right off the bat, but these articles give you an idea of what you'll need for a pressurized CO2 system. If you know what you need, you won't buy more than that and you can save yourself some money. Back to Basics is an important article. It'll help you decide what route you want to go with regard to planted tanks. For me, the larger the tank is, the more low-tech I will personally go, because frankly, I don't want to deal with 50% weekly waterchanges. I go about a month between changes in my low-tech planted. It is still a planted tank and the growth is lush and very healthy. Really depends on what you want.

llj

Thanks for your reply llj.

I will read up on the links you gave me.

What system do you use for your tanks?

 

[lljdma06]

Like I said, for large tanks, I do not use CO2 and go low-tech. For small tanks, I use good old-fashioned yeast fermentation CO2 injection. A bit old-school, but I don't like the chemical carbon and I don't see the point of pressurized for tanks as small as mine (8g). I get very stable CO2 levels, but I don't really recommend fermentation CO2 for anything larger than 10g. It just gets very impractical. You are changing canisters all the time.

llj

 

[kisin]

Thanks llj,

I have read some of the links you posted and it's starting to make a little more sense than it did in the beginning. I will just continue to read up and research