What to do?

[matt s]

Ok I know people turn off pressurized co2 at night but do you have to stop DIY Co2? If so how? Also will 2-2 liter bottles be ok for a 48 gallon with 2 WPG? One last question is whats the best way to distribute DIY Co2 With an HOB filter.
-Matt s.

[dwstonebraker]

The trick is going to be shutting off your co2 without your DIY bottle blowing up. Been there... almost had an issue. The pressurized is very worth the cost. You can find used equipment cheap if you are not in a hurry.

[swylie]

DIY CO2 can not be shut off. My mom has a cautionary story from her college days when she made homemade root beer. For those not in the know, root beer and other homemade sodas can be made with yeast, not just compressed CO2. Anyway, she heard a bang, and then another bang, and eventually discovered that the racket was coming from the closet where she'd stored: a. root beer b. linens. This stuff was in recycled glass soda bottles. I suspect that plastic will burst at even lower pressures.

The point is, you can't shut off DIY CO2. You can bleed some of the pressure or you can disconnect it for the night, but why bother?

[hooha]

You typically don't need to 'shut off' DiY CO2, with 2 wpg that setup should be fine.

As for diffusing it, you can get a small powerhead and a wooden 'airstone', place the airstone under the intake of the powerhead....I use this in my pressurized CO2 setups as well....

[matt s]

So somthing as simple as this is all i need? http://www.drsfostersmith.com/Product/Prod_Display.cfm?

[swylie]

Originally Posted by matt s

So somthing as simple as this is all i need? http://www.drsfostersmith.com/Product/Prod_Display.cfm?

Linky no worky

[matt s]

http://www.drsfostersmith.com/Produc...powerhead&Np=1 Here it is. Sorry for the mess up.

[swylie]

Absolutely that would work. Just dump your CO2 into the inlet of that thing and you'll have mini-bubbles of CO2 blowing around the tank.

[mistergreen]

it's not a big deal to let the co2 running all the time.
If you're that worried, just unscrew the DIY at night.

[jaidexl]

You can just place the wood blocks under the HOB too, that's what I do, works great and gives a purpose for having so much downward surface agitation. A PH might help in certain situations though, where that's not effective for some reason.

[Cactus Bastard]

I have my CO2 plumbed into the inlet of a small powerhead. The powerhead is on a timer, so at night time, the CO2 doesn't get chopped up and dispersed, it just burps out in large bubbles that don't dissolve at all.

[DiabloCanine]

http://www.thekrib.com/Plants/CO2/yeast-disaster.html

[PDX-PLT]

Originally Posted by swylie

My mom has a cautionary story from her college days when she made homemade root beer.

College ... root beer ... yea, right!

'got news for you - your mom may have been brewing fermented beverages in college, but if she was like 99.999% of college students, "root beer" it wasn't ...

My biology buddies used to use the lab ultracentrifuges to purfiy their brandy - and run gas chromatographs to make sure they got it right ...

[swylie]

Originally Posted by PDX-PLT

College ... root beer ... yea, right!

'got news for you - your mom may have been brewing fermented beverages in college, but if she was like 99.999% of college students, "root beer" it wasn't ...

My biology buddies used to use the lab ultracentrifuges to purfiy their brandy - and run gas chromatographs to make sure they got it right ...

Now that you mention it, my dad does have a story about shorting out the entire dorm's power when his homemade still cracked and leaked. One of his friends made horrid wine from Welch's and baker's yeast, and he was seeing whether it made any better brandy than it did wine. Still, for going to college in the late '60s, I have no clue how my parents ended up so straight and square.