CO2 Costs

[Ryanerickson]

I have about 250 gallons of water all together my main display is a 120 gallon sps tank. With that said my reactor has been running on this system for over a year and a half now my guage has barely even gone down in that time maybe 50 psi why are you guys going thru so much co2 I am using a jet stream 1 Not sure of the bottle size.by the way I have a lot of sps sucking calcium up.

[BlueTang<3]

Not sure why I was going through so much, before on the 250g the bottle would last 4-6 months and I had way more corals and clams it seemed, water volume now is 550 gallons, running a large calcium reactor and was running it off a needle valve about 4 drops per second. Switched to dosing and at 250 ml a say

[sphelps]

Slow leaks are pretty common for Ca reactors, most people don't even know they have them. Charge your line to double your running pressure, close the tank valve and see if it holds pressure for an hour, if it doesn't you have a leak. You could also have a leak in the actual reactor so you could pressure test that as well but you need to be more careful when doing so. Most reactors on the market are also pretty terrible at dissolving CO2 and/or making the most of it before the effluent, so some reactors are more efficient when it comes to CO2 usage. I would say A 20lb bottle should last about a year on the average system but it's highly variable, one of my previous systems (SPS dominant, 200G total) ran on the same CO2 tank for it's entire lifespan and while that was only around 2.5 years once the reactor was setup and I supplemented with Kalk it gives an idea how long a tank could last. IMO 2 months for 10lbs is way too short and something is off.

For CO2 here in Calgary it's around $30 to $40 for a 20lb bottle and probably not much less for a 10lb. Pretty much everywhere will also charge an extra $10 for expedited service, so you can't wait a week or so it costs more. I now use Oxipro just because they do an exchange system, you just exchange tanks so no waiting and I think it's around $40 but there's no hydro-test or other inspection cost ever added.

[Madreefer]

Originally Posted by BlueTang<3

Not sure why I was going through so much, before on the 250g the bottle would last 4-6 months and I had way more corals and clams it seemed, water volume now is 550 gallons, running a large calcium reactor and was running it off a needle valve about 4 drops per second. Switched to dosing and at 250 ml a say

Do you mean bubbles per second or the effluent from your reactor?

[msjboy]

From other bc aquaria forum site , people there say it is around $20 for a 10lb cylinder at its cheapest... mayb $30 - $36 is standard everywhere else in the GVRD area.
Does not include hydro testing of course which might be another $30 or so if you want that. They use fire extinguishing refill places, marine places that have the machines to do the refills. I assume up north, they charge more but $60 is quite pricey.

msjboy

[BlueTang<3]

Originally Posted by Madreefer

Do you mean bubbles per second or the effluent from your reactor?

Bubbles per second

[BlueTang<3]

Yeah I was using oxypro exchange bottles as well, I may have had a slow leak at reactor or tubing somewhere, I could charge the regulator and it would hold for days. Anyway I went away from this at least for now.

[StirCrazy]

I was paying about 18 bucks for a 20 lbs bottle and it would last me 8 months on a system with about 150 gal of water.

Steve