Co2 Optimat

[ghent_3rd]

I have the above kit made by tetra but I am not sure if the CO2 is diffusing back up the tube?? Is that possible?? The reason I say that is becuase the bell diffuser seems to be diffusing up to the point where the CO2 enters the tube and not much further than this. Any ideas??

Also, how do I measure the amount of CO2 in the water??

 

[alanchown]

I have the above kit made by tetra but I am not sure if the CO2 is diffusing back up the tube?? Is that possible?? The reason I say that is becuase the bell diffuser seems to be diffusing up to the point where the CO2 enters the tube and not much further than this. Any ideas??

Also, how do I measure the amount of CO2 in the water??

Is this the £15 one? I must say that I had little evidence of anything meaningful happening with this device. On the advice of others on this group I changed to the nutrafin device, which is a similar price and used the DIY recipe posted on these forums ( the enclosed sachets didn't seem to work). My PH has immediately dropped from around 8, to just above neutral, so it must be doing something!
I beliebe that there are some CO2 test kits, but the normal way seems to be by measuring KH and PH and performing a calculation. Check out the permenant thread at the top of the forium re co2.


Alan

 

[ghent_3rd]

Yeah it is the £15.00 one, I have heard that people haven't had as much success with this system but one of them got given to me for free and the other one cost just £12.

I am going to have a go with these 2 for a few weeks and see what happens. If I get no joy then I may switch to the nutrafin one. The optimat is just more convenient for me due to shift work and 2 kids under 4 years of age!! Things can get a bit hectic as you can imagine.

 

[lljdma06]

If you have a pH and KH test kit you can look up your CO2 in ppm by looking at the chart in this website. There is also a handy converter incase your values aren't in the chart. Just scroll down the webpage.

http/www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua/art_plant_co2chart.htm

Hope this helps.

llj

 

[alanchown]

The optimat is just more convenient for me due to shift work and 2 kids under 4 years of age!! Things can get a bit hectic as you can imagine.

In that case definately go for the Nutrafin. The bubbles going up the ladder will keep the kids amused for hours. It's kept me amused

 

[ghent_3rd]

I am going to go for a nutrafin kit to supplement my optimat. The Optimat one seems to be diffusing really well, I was going to buy another one of those but I will go for the Nutrafin one so I have the best of both worlds. The optimat for convenience and the Nutrafin one for control.

I'll definately be binning the supplied activator and stabiliser and going with the supplied mixture on the forum though. Wish me luck!!!!