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Unread 07/25/2008, 09:30 PM   #112
herring_fish
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Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Winston-Salem NC, USA
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You do not need to add CO2.



Of course this is a minor point but you do not need to add CO2 to the water to get the algae to grow better. If you want to lower the water temperature in the tank, then maximizing evaporation is a very good thing but adding air to the water will not help or hurt the algae.

I only make this point because I am an ardent supporter of Algae Turf Scrubbers of any design that works. It looks like the vertical scrubber described here works very well. The only thing is that other people that are looking for ideas might get the impression that supplementing CO2 is important or even necessary. This is not the case.

I did some surfing on the net and found a study done on an out door fresh water operation that was designed to treat affluent from cow farms. One line stood out. “There were no significant differences in algal productivity, algal N and P content, or N and P recovery values from raceways with carbon dioxide supplementation compared to values from raceways without added carbon dioxide.”

None of the designs in Dr. Adey’s book allude to CO2 injection. If it helped, you would see people that have CO2 reactors shunting off some of the gas to turbocharger the scrubber.

I ran scrubbers for 10 years and for about 8 of those years, I using the long flat dump bucket that I have talked about before. The water was pumped via a power head, from the tank to the bucket with no splash or aeration.


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