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.