Testing Water Flow

[nugrad2005]

I was wondering if there was a way to test water flow and see the actual path of the water. My original thought was to use some sort of food coloring or something of that sort, but then i really thought about it and realized that introducing food coloring to a tank is a poor idea.

I might be adding some powerheads soon so once i get those i really want to see where the water is going.

Any ideas?

-Dan

 

[mound]

I had wondered about that once as well.. Are there fish in the tank yet or are you just setting it up?

 

[nugrad2005]

No there are already fish in the tank.

 

[mound]

hmm.. I'm not sure that food coloring would necessarilly hurt anything, but I don't know how long it would take to be filtered out.. it could dye rocks/corals as well I guess.. hmmm.. I'll let ya know if I think of anything

 

[fishfreek]

You could drop a few bits of small flake food in the tank in front of a PH and see how it moves around. You could also turn the ventrui on in your PH and see how the air bubbles move around. There are so many variables that would affect how water would flow in a tank its crazy to think about.

Moving one section of LR around in the tank could/would change how the water flowed around the tank. Such a simple change could put an area of low flow now in an area of high flow.

 

[nugrad2005]

Yeah flake food is a good idea. Although my little guys love to eat so hopefully there would be some left!

I was thinking maybe something that is black light sensitive? Or would that be too toxic?

-Dan

 

[RogerMcAllen]

It would look really cool if you could get some semi-flotable beads and watch them under a blacklight. Actually something that is partially floating would work really well as long as you made sure it was too big for the fish's mouth. It would probably be best to just remove the fish.