Monday, June 21, 2010

I started up my culturing apparatus the other day to test its effects as a CO2 room scrubber. It's currently sitting in my window sill with the air pump on a timer. It has been growing fairly quickly. I've been weighing the apparatus every other day and am surprised to see such an increase in such a small container. The true weight test will be when I start making dry measures of the filtered algae cells which should be sometimes late this week. Until my filtration apparatus comes in the mail I will be using coffee filters (about 20microns) to filter the algae out of my system.

I produce roughly around 200g of CO2 daily in my bedroom (1kg daily into the environment).
1 gram of algae dry mass is approximately equivalent to 1.8g of CO2.
Therefore I would need about a 30 gallon tank to filter out the necessary CO2 produced in my bedroom. Yes I am currently using a 1.5L vessel to perform these duties, this is of course just a test to see how efficient my homebrew device is compared to some of the "big boy's" in the industry.

3 comments:

  1. I am in the process of building a desktop photobioreactor for CO2 scrubbing. Do you have any recommendations for a goos algae strain that either a) are efficient or b) are a nice bright green (aesthetics is actually more important than efficiency in my project...)?

    Thanks,
    -Robotguy

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  2. Yes robotguy, Chlorella vugaris would probably be the most aesthetic if you are looking for a nice coherent green color. It's cheap, eukaryotic, and not very picky about perfect living conditions.

    There are some red algae out there, however most of the ones I have encountered are either hard to grow in large quantities in DIY reactors, or they become "stringy" and do not have good aesthetic value.

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  3. Chris

    Would you be interested in Diatoms.
    They are easy to grow and they are good food for fish, chicken, etc.

    Bhaskar
    www.kadambari.net

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