Yeah, you have to hit that point of wealth where you can buy the really nice aquarium and pay someone to do all the maintenance. Otherwise it would be a nightmare. You’d need a SCUBA suit to clean this.
Is there an aquarium near you? They always need volunteer divers for tank maintenance. They usually want people with full face mask certs so they can put comms and air through it instead of making you wear a tank that could whack things but they'll sometimes train you on site.
Ngl, it does sound kinda awesome, duving into the tank, cutting my big ass plants, cleaning up the gravel with a underwater vacuum and most importantly: greeting my hundreds of nano fish
It is actually pretty cool, I worked for the company that built the rainforest Cafe tanks and I was inside a number of them, sometimes on purpose sometimes not lol
Money. I own 250 gallons , 125 salt and 125 fresh, without being rich.those tanks are expensive to maintain and the stocking isn’t the cheapest aswell.but most of it is used.point being you can maintain bigger tanks than your wallet „should“ allow with patience.what does a tank like this cost? 10 grand? Doable even without being rich.
You misunderstand how air supply underwater works, but that's cool... I got a minute.
Whether using surface supplied air or SCUBA, air needs to be compressed beyond surface pressures to be delivered to the diver.
Scuba equipment includes 3 critical components, (1) High pressure tank, (2) balanced first stage, (3) second stage / including mouth piece. If pictures help, click the links.
The high pressure tank supplies air at very high pressure... starting ~3000psi, which is too high to breath straight.
The SCUBA first stage uses an ambient pressure diaphragm to reduce tank pressure to a more manageable 120-150psi, and delivers the intermediate pressure to the second stage. more 1st stage details
The second stage provides the final adjustment to provide air at the pressure required for you to breath without struggling. Another ambient pressure diaphragm combined with a breathing resistance adjustment lever/knob sets the final air delivery within a range of slight positive to slightly negative. more 2nd stage details
Your body can only breath air at depth because the SCUBA system starts at higher pressures and uses ambient pressure diaphragms to step down the pressure to ambient at the current depth so that your own diaphragm can expand your lungs (or have air pushed in, if you set the regulator for positive pressure).
As a basic concept of the pressure of water and it's challenges, your torso is likely has more than 5 ft2 or 720 in2 of surface area. At 3 feet of depth, the water column already applies 1.3 psi on an object. This is a simplified view, but the math clearly gets brutal. A long 'breather tube' as suggested above would simply not work without forcing continuous air or using a regulator with an intermediate pressure described in in point #2 above.
The 'demand valve' you mention, is a term used for the second stage regulator valve, which would fail to operate without the intermediate pressure hose providing a sufficient pressure to operate the whole mechanism.
It would be cool until you realize that your just cleaning a really dirty room in the most inconvenient way. The fish and coral are all going to be pissed as soon as you start and as soon as you get out and take your suit off you’re going to see all the spots you missed.
How long does it take to get in and out of a dive suit? Imagine being inside your tank scrubbing and realizing burglars are in your house but all you can do is watch through the blurry glass/water and try not to panic
You have to be careful with things like that. There's a lot of pressure underwater. When you surface, everything in you wants to expand, including the air on your lungs. Surface high enough with your lungs full of air and the lungs go pop
I don't think you could get deep enough and still be able to breathe through an tube/hose for that too happen. If it's just a tube, it's can't be very long, otherwise it's just like rebreathing the air in a bag. It also takes more effort the longer the tube is.
I mean, you have to be a lot deeper than 4 meters but yeah, they literally will pop. The pressure will condense the air youre breathing. Its greater than the energy making the molecules ping around, if I remember correctly. As you come to the surface the pressure lessens and the molecules will start bouncing off each other and will force more space between them. Essentially, the air you breathed in will get considerably bigger than your lungs.
The advice is to breath as normally as you can. Oh, check out submarine escape suits if anyones interested. They work on the concept.
One of the major rules of diving is to never hold your breath. If you’re deep enough for it to matter, as long as you’re exhaling as you go up you’re ok.
For a few hundred bucks you can get a compressor that shoots breathable air out a hose that you can just stick in your mouth. There are some fisherman (somewhere) who net fish and use this method to stay underwater. Super dangerous as they have to swim inside the net and one dude has the job of keeping the lines from getting tangled. But one person with one tube in an aquarium would be no problem.
A five thousand liter pond isn't really very big, and people don't exactly spend lots of time on maintenance for that. I'm pretty sure you could keep an Aquarium this size in a way that you need minimal maintenance.
Sure, if you make it a fancy reef tank with tons of expensive coral, it's gonna be quite the effort, but if it's a nice planted tank with low stocking? nah, should be easy.
Big filters, oversized pumps, 3x the pump capacity and oxygenation than is required and a dial to turn them up and down as needed. That's my recipe for trouble free reef and salt water tanks. Hasn't failed me yet.
Many moons ago, I did aquarium service and had a few clients with absurdly large aquariums. Once you get above a certain depth, there's just no point in even trying anything less than diving in. The largest aquarium I worked on was ~5000 gallons, and required 2 people to clean in any reasonable time frame. Water changes were automated, but we still had to add salt to the make up water, chems to the dosers, and change the dozens of filter socks. Someone would do that while another cleaned the glass.
Diving was rarely required, really only when we needed to change or clean the hardscape. When we did dive, both of us had to be there. Someone would target feed the fish to distract them while the other did the dive. Typically only like 20 mins total in the tank.
I mean, I swim in the ocean and lakes and rivers. If it's a halfway descent ecosystem hooked to a halfway descent filtration system then it should be pretty great to actually swim with my fish. How gross is your tank?
Yea it wouldn’t be a problem, plus it’s too time consuming to do it yourself, id only maintain the filtration and make sure the water quality is good myself
1.4k
u/Bunny-Tummy Aug 17 '22
I literally fantasize about having a tank like that.