Are bubble counters necessary with an inline diffuser

You can use water in your bubble counter but people like mineral oil because it doesn't evaporate.

I'm not sure why bubble counters will be useless? How would you know how much Co2 you're pushing out? Are you going to sit there and gauge your plants and fish or wait the 2 hours for the drop checker to change?

I'm not directly asking you that question, it's more so on whoever says it's useless. It's useless in the sense that my bps is different from your bps if we have two different set up.

Bubble counters are great for monitoring if the rate of flow is changing, not great at describing the amount of Co2 in the tank. What I mean is, if you're set up is at 1 bps and the next day it's at 1.5 bps and changes on the third day, you will see the changes right away in your bubble counter.

For the GLA primo setup, you would have to ask them about that. Maybe they don't want mineral oil to leak into the flowing water, it would probably clog your inline diffuser.

TLDR; Bubble counters are useless at describing the Co2 in your tank compare to someone else, but they are great at describing the amount of Co2 you're releasing with the needle valve.

wharfrat said:

Sorry to sound ignorant...but I am. I was reading in a thread that for atomizer/diffusers bubble counters were useless. Is this accurate? Also the bubble counter that comes with the GLA primo setup...can it be used with water because the directions on the atomic inline diffusers say not to use the solution with bubble counters?

Click to expand...

It's not so much that they're useless, you just have to understand their limitations. Bubble counters are only a reference so you can titrate co2 in your particular setup. It is not a means of measuring how much co2 you are using. Some people describe their setups saying "i'm running at 2 BPS". This is useless information because a bubble is not a quantity of co2. The amount of co2 in a bubble varies based on many factors (temp, pressure, solution etc).

When the atomizers first came out some people claimed they were much more efficient because they used half as much co2. These claims were based on the observation that they were able to drop their bps to half their previous rate and have same level of co2 in the water. These claims were later proven false. The BPS was lower mostly because of the increased pressure used to run the atomizers (and only partially due to the greater diffusion efficiency of atomizers).

As for the solution in the bubble counter, people have had issues with the mineral oil destroying their atomizers. Basically, if oil finds its way into your atomizer, the atomizer will be damaged beyond repair. Because of this it is recommended to only fill the bubble counters with water.

For measuring co2 levels in your tank, a drop checker is really the only economical means of doing.