Evaporation Rate

[Donya]

I'm getting too much annoying salt spray and having a hard time keeping the sg where I want it in my pico because the water is evaporating so fast. The extra turbulance that's causing spray and evap is from a bubble line into a rotating powerhead. Without the bubbles pumping in it would still be 35x gph, just without a really choppy surface. If I ditch the bubbles and thereby solve the excessive evaporation rate and spray, will the oxygen levels stay high enough for inverts?

 

[Mr Miagi]

Yes. At 35x turnover in a Pico, surface agitation should be suffcient for oxygen/co2 diffusion.

How large is the surface in comparison to volume?

 

[Donya]

Cool, thanks. The surface area ratio is about like on a 20 gallon high I think. I will try to get a hole of a ruler later and see what the dimensions are.

 

[Donya]

Evap rate and everything is SOOOO much better now. That darn bubbler made a really big difference...the inverts are all acting fine, no change there so I'm guessing dissolved O2 is still fine. I took the extra airline/pump power and turned it into this:

The pico-skimmer! LOL well, an experimental attempt at one anyway. I think the design needs some improvement, but so far it only shot high-velocity foam out the top once....actually twice if you count shooting foam out the bottom once

Still trying to get a ruler to measure tank dimensions.

 

[Mr Miagi]

hahaha, i love that idea, with a bit more re-fining, you might have a great invention there!

Good to hear evaporation levels are down!

 

[Donya]

Yay it worked! I had a very small amount of dirty stuff collected this morning and 0 nitrates....there were small amounts before that. Not bad for a little $1 frankenskimmer I'm going to go get stuff today to stick a valve on the air-out holes for beter pressure control, and I'm going to switch the airstone over to the "correct" type. The one I've got right now was just to see if I could get the air pressure doing what I wanted, so I didn't expect a whole lot out of it. Pretty amazing really that it skimmed my nitrates away with that little bubble force. Only other key improvement comming to mind at the moment is maybe a divided water tube...airstone in one side, lets water flow more easily down the other...I'll have to ponder that one for a while.