GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post - This one seems to cause some very negative comments.

21-01-2005, 11:24 PM

(Richard Sexton) wrote in :

In article .com,
spiral_72 wrote:
Anyways....... I bought some dry ice at Publix (a grocery store) for
$1.09 a pound.... Cheap enough I guess. I put about 1 inch of water in
a 20oz coke bottle and 3 pieces of dry ice about the size of a quarter
I suppose......Screwed the top on and um, hehe It went from a coke
bottle shape.... to a um, round kinda shape and all the pleats in the
bottle pulled out.......That is untill it exploded.

Hey if you like that you should try to find the webpage
that has the videos of a guy dropping one pound blcoks
of pure sodium metal into water. That makes a nice bang too
with the added benefit of throwing molten metal and
lye all over the place.

There's one around!??!! Oh man I remember wishing that ever since high
school chemistry class. Our teacher has this huge chunk of sodium (kept
in oil) and he only gave us a tiny chunk to put into a beaker of water
to watch the reaction. I always wanted to get my hands on that chunk
and put it in a swimming pool... or how about a bucket of chlorine. If
sodium reacts that well with H2O I'm sure it would be dandy with CL for
a quick reaction to NACL :P

Actually spiral, I might have a safe (if less exciting) way for your
idea to work. Since all you want to do is have a consistant amount of
CO2 going into your tank, you need a reactor that is consistant but
doesn't build up pressure.

If you have an open bottomed box submerged in your tank with an air hose
from it to your CO2 tank (no valve), the amount of CO2 going into your
tank would depend on the size of the box (the surface area of the open
side). Excess CO2 produced would eventually overflow the box and bubble
up so no explosion risk.

If you find you're not getting enough CO2 dissolving into your tank
water, just get a bigger box which will have a bigger surface area for
the CO2 to react and dissolve into the water. I believe putting it
deeper also works.

Once you have the right size and getting 20-30 ppm of CO2 in your tank,
if you find you're wasting too much CO2 (it's bubbling out of the box)
just insulate the CO2 container more to slow it down.. you should be
able to get a pretty close balance so little CO2 is wasted.

Only problem with this method would be if the CO2 sublimates so quickly,
even with insulation that you waste too much of it.

All that being said, it might be easier and cheaper (unless you get some
free dryice) to go the yeast/sugar DIY co2 method which also has been
known to blow up bottles if that's a must :P

Cheers
P.