Home made CO2 question

[dean9922]

does anyone use the homemade CO2 setups in their planted tanks. I've been looking at these and wonder if anyone has any luck with the yeast, pop bottle setup....if so how do you set it up, maybe there is a better way of doing it then i have found....also how would you control the amount of CO2 with this setup...
does not look reliable to me, however if anyone has had success with this, any info would be appreciated....thanks to anyone responding

[calihawker]

I've never done the yeast method. I have a home made reactor but of course most of the setup is the whole pressurized system.



Steve

[dean9922]

hi calihawker
are you talking about the tank with guages etc....or some other homemade unit that can be built for a lot cheaper then the valves and CO2 cylinders....
thanks for responding

[calihawker]

Yes, my system uses the cylinder, regulator and gauges. The DIY part of it is the reactor and bubble counter. I can't think of a full homemade system except for the yeast thing.

Have you tried the planted tank forums?

http://www.plantedtank.net/forums/



Steve

[drew22to375]

does anyone use the homemade CO2 setups in their planted tanks. I've been looking at these and wonder if anyone has any luck with the yeast, pop bottle setup....if so how do you set it up, maybe there is a better way of doing it then i have found....also how would you control the amount of CO2 with this setup...
does not look reliable to me, however if anyone has had success with this, any info would be appreciated....thanks to anyone responding

I used the pop bottle yeast method years ago on a 29 gallon. I just attached the airline from the pop bottle to a wood air stone for those old protein skimmer models. Placed it at the bottom of the tank below my return from my canister filter. It worked just fine. There is no way of controlling the co2. I guess you could put a valve on it but I would be worried about building up to much pressure and having exploding pop bottle. One thing I did was I had the airline from the bottle go into another empty smaller bottle then had another line from the empty bottle to the air stone. That way no sugar/yeast mixture would enter your tank. I had to make a new mixture about every 2 weeks. It would take about 1 day to build up enough pressure to start bubbling. It works for small tanks I think 40 gallon would probably be the biggest it would work on.

Drew..

[Wahter]

Here are three articles:

http://aquariumhobbyist.com/discus/nccape/articles/diyco2/index.html
http://www.tropicalfishcentre.co.uk/Diyco2.htm
http://www.thekrib.com/Plants/CO2/

Walter

[dean9922]

thanks drew and wahter.....

[cc_woman]

I have a 2L and a 4L yeast set up on some tanks. I drill a hole in the lid of the bottle barely large enough to get the airline tube through, then I silicone the airline tube to the lid making sure I get all the cracks. In the 2L I use 1 cup sugar, 1 tsp yeast and then fill 3/4 with luke warm water. In the 4L I just double the recipe. I then attach the airline to a power head, and most power heads you can adjust the flow rate on so you can turn down the flow. I use aquaclear power heads or any power head will do that has the hole for an air tube (which normally sucks O2 and makes bubbles). I have to change it every week and a half or so though, but if you use brewers yeast or wine yeast it should last a bit longer (I only have regular baking yeast).