Aquatic Plant Central - View Single Post

hoppycalif · 11-26-2006, 07:24 PM

Last week I took a trip to Tap Plastics, where I bought a 1" dia, 1/16" wall thickness acrylic tube, to go with my existing 5/8", 1/16" wall acrylic tube, and some acrylic disks - 1", 1/2", 5/8" diameter, plus a tube of medium viscosity acrylic cement. Then I spent a couple of hours yesterday and a couple of hours today, using only hand tools plus a cordless drill to make a couple of DIY drip checkers. The first one is probably the fastest reacting one:

The second one is probably the easiest to read the color on. I used white fingernail polish to paint the inside of the air gap tube which becomes the background for the fluid in the bulb.

Tomorrow I plan to load both with distilled 5 dKH water and reagent and place them in the tank at the same time, to see how they compare. I will post those results, too.

Edit: Today I loaded them and added them to the tank.

Edit: After two hours all three of the devices have the same color. The one with the white background was the slowest to get started with the color change, by a half hour or so, but once they were all changing color, both of the DIY ones ended up with the green color at about 2 hours. Now, I'm not sure what affects the response time of these, but I am sure that both of these DIY designs work well. (Both of these have been spoken for now. Maybe someone else would like to start making these and selling them here?)

11-26-2006, 07:24 PM	#113 (permalink)
hoppycalif Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Sacramento, CA, USA Posts: 5,208 iTrader Ratings: 20 iTrader Positive Rating: 100% Plant Points: 227345	Last week I took a trip to Tap Plastics, where I bought a 1" dia, 1/16" wall thickness acrylic tube, to go with my existing 5/8", 1/16" wall acrylic tube, and some acrylic disks - 1", 1/2", 5/8" diameter, plus a tube of medium viscosity acrylic cement. Then I spent a couple of hours yesterday and a couple of hours today, using only hand tools plus a cordless drill to make a couple of DIY drip checkers. The first one is probably the fastest reacting one: The second one is probably the easiest to read the color on. I used white fingernail polish to paint the inside of the air gap tube which becomes the background for the fluid in the bulb. Tomorrow I plan to load both with distilled 5 dKH water and reagent and place them in the tank at the same time, to see how they compare. I will post those results, too. Edit: Today I loaded them and added them to the tank. Edit: After two hours all three of the devices have the same color. The one with the white background was the slowest to get started with the color change, by a half hour or so, but once they were all changing color, both of the DIY ones ended up with the green color at about 2 hours. Now, I'm not sure what affects the response time of these, but I am sure that both of these DIY designs work well. (Both of these have been spoken for now. Maybe someone else would like to start making these and selling them here?) Last edited by hoppycalif : 11-27-2006 at 02:41 PM.