• Folks, if you've recently upgraded or renewed your annual club membership but it's still not active, please reach out to the BOD or a moderator. The PayPal system has a slight bug which it doesn't allow it to activate the account on it's own.

DIY carbon reactor, any links??????????

did'nt the club do a DIY carbon reactor a few months back, are there any links that you might know of. I have my own idea but i just wanted to see how others did theirs
 
You can make these pretty cheap out of PVC if you want. Just pick up a 2" or 3" piece of PVC pipe. I'd suggest rigging it to use a screw-type cap for the top to get the media in it. Drill a hole for a 1/4" tap into the top and bottom caps. You'll want to find some type of "screen" to use for the top and bottom to keep the media from clogging your taps. You could cut a piece of eggcrate and glue nylon screen to it.

Ideally, you feed water in through the bottom and the out is the top so all air is flushed out of the unit.

You can make this type of unit as big as you need but I'd suggest not going much bigger then twice the size of a phosban reactor. The downside to this DIY is that you can't see through the chamber (PVC pipe).

Also worth noting, there is a group buy in progress on the Phosban reactors. It's probably a lot easier to just get in on it and save yourself the trouble of building one. :)

Carlo
 

JohnS_323

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Yeah, we did a calcium reactor build in February 2006. I would describe it as a big bust. I don't think anyone who built one wound up using it. We gave it way more than the college try and had ours running in our sump for about a year. The thing was awful. We started it out with the screw in drain fittings and they leaked constantly. I swapped them out for a fernco fitting and that was a little better but eventually wound up leaking too.

Here is the link to the instruction thread. Having gone through this, I would recommend NOT doing it. If you feel you want to, it is essential that you don't take cheap shortcuts on any of the parts.

I will tell you that the guy who started the thread was very helpful in answering questions and helping us with our issues but in the end we gave up and bought one from MRC.

Good luck!
 
Top