Carbon doser regulator... Should I get it?

kris2001 · Oct 19, 2022

Anyone here tried the carbon doser regulator for calcium reactor for a long time and had success? I heard it's very accurate set it forget it type... is it reliable.. is it worth the $300?
Pic of my current MRC with single stage regulator.

Thx

92Miata · Oct 19, 2022

"Is it worth it" is a question that's very tied to your personal values - so it's hard to answer.

The Carbon Doser (well, the original one) is a cheap regulator with a $20 clippard mouse solenoid attached to a $.50 555 timer chip and a variable resistor. The 555 timer just opens and closes the mouse solenoid rapidly. Mouse solenoids are really reliable and have a rated lifetime of like a billion cycles. The rest, who knows?

I'm not a big fan. It's a decent idea - but it should be a $60 product - and failure mode could be basically wide open. I prefer mechanical control to electronic here.

The direction I went with mine is a really good needle valve - basically surplus/used medical devices - that are capable of metering CO2 at low pressures to an insanely fine degree. You know how your cheap needle valve basically goes from no Co2 to OMGCO2! in like a quarter turn? A good precision valve will go 20+ full rotations before its releasing anywhere near as much CO2 as a 1/4 turn on the cheap valve.

I paid $24 for an Aalborg VM3-SV, and $16 for an Aalborg flow meter it would fit in (ebay). Then another $25 or so in various fittings (clippard check valve, some adapter nipples, etc). Currently I'm running only about 10ml/min through my reactor via peristaltic pump, and pH is a slight sinusoidal line from 6.21 to 6.23 (couple hours offset from the tank's ph cycle), with absolutely no electronic control - solenoid open 100% of the time.

Here's a thread on planted tanks - its a list of like a million valves that will work well -and show up on ebay/etc pretty regularly.

Precision flow valves selection for our CO2 pressurized...

Precision Metering valve, needle valve and flow control/controller This is a new info thread, the old thread started in 2011, I have stopped adding info since 2014, six year passed. The old metering valve selection thread --Metering valve: Most are high precision flow rate control valves...

www.plantedtank.net