Tore down the CO2 setup after three years and the low tech rebuild looks better
Three years of pressurised CO2 on a 60 litre. Regulator, solenoid on a timer, drop checker, the whole thing. It grew plants like nothing else and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
It also meant trimming twice a week, dosing on a schedule, and a background hum of anxiety about the cylinder running out while I was away. Twice I came back to melted stems. Once the solenoid stuck open overnight and I lost most of a shrimp colony, which is the actual reason I stopped.
Rebuilt it in April as low tech. Same tank, same light on a shorter photoperiod, slower plants, no injection, dosing about once a week and honestly sometimes not.
It grows maybe a third as fast. It looks better than it ever did, and I think that is because a third as fast means I am not hacking it back to the substrate every Sunday just to keep up. Things get to fill in and mature instead of being constantly reset.
@co2_forever · 2w ago · 4 replies
Genuinely happy this worked out but I want to separate two things, because the shrimp incident is not an argument against CO2, it is an argument against an unmonitored solenoid.
A pH controller or even just a second timer as a hard cutoff prevents exactly that failure. Plenty of us run injection for years without ever gassing anything. The trimming workload is a real and fair complaint. The disaster is a preventable equipment problem.
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@tore_it_down · 2w ago · 2 replies
That is a reasonable distinction and I would probably agree if it had happened once. It is the combination that got me: the failure is preventable, the trimming is not, and I was only tolerating the risk because I wanted the growth I was then throwing in the bin every week.
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@co2_forever · 2w ago
Throwing the growth in the bin every week is a fair point and it is the part of this hobby that makes the least sense when you say it out loud.
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@algae_veteran · 2w ago
Worth adding that the stuck-open failure is a lot more common on cheap solenoids and people rarely mention which one they had.
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