CO2 Scrubber - Moisture/Humidity

[BetterJake]

I recently set up a CO₂ scrubber on my tank and saw fantastic results on day one, my pH, which typically hovered between 7.6 and 7.8, peaked at 8.3.

However, after that initial spike, pH began to decline. I was dumbfounded, there’s no way the media was exhausted after just one day. After some digging, I’m pretty sure the real issue was the 1 tsp of water in the bottom of the scrubber reservoir evaporating and the media getting too dry.

I understand recirculating setups help maintain humidity and extend media life, but I’d prefer to avoid that since I don’t want to lose the oxygenation benefits of my skimmer pulling in fresh air.

That said, if I have to manually top off water in the scrubber every single day, that’s not a viable long-term solution either.

I’m using the BRS scrubber connected to the intake of a Red Sea RSK 300 skimmer. Any creative ideas for keeping the media humid without daily maintenance?

 

[cdemoss01]

Tough question for sure... You could humidiphy it with a wyze timer maybe.

 

[bluemon]

I’ve been looking for a good solution for this as well, to no avail.

I was thinking of maybe have a doser with a RODI dripping into the intake of the CO2 scrubber?

Or maybe work in a wick/cloth/semipermeable membrane into the intake with the wick connected to a water source?

 

[hoffmeyerz]

When I ran mine I had the air intake line go into a jar with RO/DI.
I took a canning jar and drilled two holes in the lid just barely big enough for a barbed hose fitting. Wrapped a bunch of Teflon tape around the threads and screwed them in. Took the end of the air-in line and put that on one fitting and ran a line off the other fitting to the intake on the scrubber.
Filled the jar about 3/4 full of RO/DI. This acted on the same principle as recirculating from the skimmer keeping the air moist as it enters the scrubber. Jar would last at least a week depending on the humidity of the source air.

 

[Waters]

For the years that I ran mine, the water evaporated just as yours did but it never affected the performance.