Scuba oxygen tank to oxygenate a DWC?

[jmo124]

Evening guys,

We've got a 130 gallon custom deep water culture system and we're finding that the air pumps are getting so hot that they're pumping hot air through the air stones and bringing up the temperature of our water.

Would pumping oxygen straight from a large oxygen tank (found at a scuba or paintball store?) be a viable option? Should an oxygen overload be of any concern? Is there even such a thing?

[tinytoon]

From what I have read and such I do not believe you can put to much O2 into your water. DWC has always been labeled the more O2 the better. As for your O2 tank, you might want to put a welding supply store on your list of places to possibly get O2 from or even a medical supply outfit.

[Prodaytrader]

FYI SCUBA tanks are not O2 tanks nor are paintball gun tanks either. SCUBA tanks use compressed air, not enriched air. The difference is similar to your tire versus a breathing machine in a hospital. All SCUBA tanks do is take ambient air and compress it into a confined space. Enriched air tanks filter out certain gases such as CO2 in an effort to get a more pure form of say oxygen into the tank. Makes it easier for a hospital to control exactly what the patient is receiving.

Same goes for paintball tanks. The early tanks were C02 tanks and those are black. That would do the exact opposite of what you are looking for. Later paintball guns went to Nitrogen tanks and that too would do nothing for you. Paintball guns are using compressed air tanks now which is what I use on my paintball gun. Those tanks are similar to the SCUBA tanks and your tire in that there are no concentrations of any one particular gas in there.

What you want my friend is an oxygen tank from a hospital or one of those breath at home systems. They are green on top and silver on the bottom. This is only good for the water though as the top side of the plant will not like all that oxygen. Instead that top side will want C02 and lots of it. Not sure how you will manage that issue.

Also, it should be noted that I doubt you can get any sustained flow of bubbles from an oxygen tank. I suspect that it would bleed out within a few hours wouldn't it? Every tank I have ever played with, no matter how little the flow, always bleeds out pretty fast. It's not like you would be doing bursts every so often like in CO2 systems used for growing or other compressed air technology such as paintball guns. Those systems let out bursts of air in short cycles not needing sustained air flows. I can attest first hand that paintball gun efficiency went way down when the gun technology went from short bursts of air to propel the ball to a longer less intense burst of air to ease the ball forward and then to accelerate it. That redesign alone accounted for something like 30% decrease in efficiency to the tanks shot capacity. This would lead me to believe that anything you did that was on continuously wouldn't last very long at all. Less then a day I would suspect.