Blowing Up Gold Fish

I thought I might use the excess air to spin some sort of tiny turbine or windmill that generated electricity to light a low voltage light to indicate that everything was working as it should be working, but that never happened just like lots of things never happen.

Return to the daze of my youth.

I remember back in 2014, working on a homemade aquarium pump to put air into a 300 gallon fish tank in my back yard. My Goldfish seemed healthy enough but they were still small and there were only 9 little fishies in the tank — eventually as they grew and I added more fish, the oxygen levels would be depleted.

I could have bought a machine cheap enough but I had planned to run several of the 300 gallon tanks in the future so I wanted something with extra capacity. Thus I got my hands on a used medical oxygen machine, stripped out all the parts I didn’t need, rewired it, hooked up a water hose as a makeshift air hose and turned it on to test it.

Damned thing nearly blew my fish out of the tank! Duckweed went flying into the air! I quickly shut it off.

I tested it for an hour or so without having the hose in the tank. The motor didn’t appear to overheat and the intake filter and pump were functioning perfectly. I figured the next step was to build some sort of manifold and valve arrangement that would allow me to inject only part of the air into the tank, and send the rest of it away somewhere.

I thought I might use the excess air to spin some sort of tiny turbine or windmill that generated electricity to light a low voltage light to indicate that everything was working as it should be working, but that never happened just like lots of things never happen.

Anyway, my Goldfish are all just fine, and now I have about 20 giant Goldfish swimming happily in the tank. Oh, and I ended up buying an air pump.

But I do still have the old medical oxygen pump just in case I ever get around to adding a few more fish tanks.

Please continue with Not on My Watch