So I’ve been talking about making reef aquariums carbon free. This means that energy required to power your aquarium comes from a source that doesn’t generate any carbon footprint. Years ago this was either impossible, or extraordinarily expensive. Personal wind turbine technology was in its infancy, and no company existed that was investing in developing personal turbines. The same can be said about solar. Solar power existed, but there wasn’t a huge investment in personal solar technology, or solar systems meant to power an entire home, or for a single purpose such as heating water. Today renewable energy is having a renaissance. The building industry is striving to make energy efficiency a standard, and with that have come a host of advances in solar, and solar/propane shared technology. There still exists a lot of confusion about how energy consumption works, and how our aquariums translate into the factor of generating a carbon footprint. I will try to breakdown some of that information and present dollar value figures, as to what it costs to power an average reef aquarium on the power grid, and what it costs to make that aquarium carbon neutral via solar technology. An average reef aquarium:
For this comparison I put together an amount of wattage consumption for the average reef aquarium. This is a tank around 100-150 gallons, which is operating a modern return pump, two circulation pumps, two 150 watt heaters, three leading LED lighting fixtures, a protein skimmer and several reactors.
- Circulation and return pump power consumption: around 164 watts
- Lighting power consumption: around 450 watts
- Heating power consumption: 300 watts
- Filtration, skimmer, etc: 125 watts
This brings an average aquarium’s total power consumption to 1,039 watts, just over a kilowatt hour of power. To power this tank on grid power at the average national rate of 12 cents per hour, the aquarist is only paying $ 2.88 per day, for a total of $ 1,051.20 yearly. If you’re using grid power, it’s likely coming from coal, natural gas or in some rare cases wind and solar. Other power generators are hydroelectric, but those are fairly rare. If your power is generated using coal, your tank is burning through about 25.2 pounds of coal per day, and 9,198 pounds of coal each year. Thus powering the tank releases 50 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere per-day, and 18,250 pounds of CO2 per year.… More:
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