ray-the-pilot

What is the right “bubbles per minute” to set your pressurize CO2 system at?

That is the same thing as saying how much oil should I burn per day to keep my house warm?

Well I think you should set your thermostat at 68 deg and your house will be comfortable and you should set your CO2 controller at green to blue green and your CO2 will be great

helgymatt

What exactly is your question?

I run mine so the drop checker is mostly yellow. Bubbles per minute depends on a lot of things...tank size, filter type, pH, etc.

ray-the-pilot

Do you have any fish? And what kind? And is your drop checker calibrated?

helgymatt

Yes, tank is full of fish. People need to realize that just because a drop checker, this doesn't mean the CO2 is always optimum. The drop checker is just an indicator and has a lot of error. CO2 can vary greatly in different areas of the tank and the drop checker can read different in any of those places. I have two in my tank. In one area the checker is almost always yellow and the other stays green. You should use it as an indicator and then fine tune from there. I find that I can run more CO2 than what just makes my checker green. I turn up my CO2 slowly, watch the fish and plants and settle on a good rate.

Manwithnofish

So, for you, what is it? What's a good rate for helgymatt's 75 gal. water wonderland?

Helgy, don't know that it matters, but it might be interesting to see how much variance there is from one helgymatter to another.

helgymatt

I cant count that fast, but it must be ~5 bubbles per second. My 29 gallon runs about 2 bubbles per second.

Manwithnofish

Wow...well we can throw that "rule of thumb", "bubbles per second" out the window. Seems to be very dependent on size. Hum...is it true? Size matters?

helgymatt

Yes, size does matter! Wouldn't it make sense that a larger volume of water would require more CO2 than a smaller volume of water to reach the same concentration???

By the way, what "rule of thumb" are you referring to? That a green drop checker means everything is perfect?

Manwithnofish

I thought there was a "rule of thumb" on this. It seems everyone told me to set my CO2 between 2-3 bubbles per second. I guess I just never thought about it. So, when it's clear that size matters, why do folks tell me how many bps I should use. I think I first saw this on Rex's site...but maybe not.

Footnote: I only ran my CO2 for three weeks and shut it all down....so I never really ran it long enough to get much experience with it.

Minsc

I keep my house at 55 and wear a sweater 'cause I can't afford heat. I raise my bps slowly until the plants stop showing CO2 deficiencies and the algae starts dying.