I’ve seen many posts and builds about paintball setups for aquascaping. But, I’ve never found one that gave me a budget option when setting up CO2 aquarium (aside from DIY) and let alone from a single aquarium supplies store online (Amazon in this case).

But, do you need CO2 for aquarium plants? Well, you don’t need it but your plants will grow more faster and fuller and in higher quality. So I created this CO2 aquarium guide for the common man.

This time around, I’m going to take a different approach and do less explaining with words and more explaining with images of the aquarium CO2 system itself. So, get ready to be inspired to setup your very own complete CO2 system for your aquarium!

Aquatic equipment: CO2 regulator

A. CO2 Regulator with Solenoid; an electrically powered unit used to control and monitor the flow of CO2

B. Paintball tank; used to store CO2 for aquarium plants

CO2 diffuser for aquarium tank

A: CO2 diffuser; Used as a medium of CO2 injection into your water column (infuse your aquarium water with CO2)

How to measure CO2 in aquarium? a drop checker of course

A: CO2 diffuser

B: Drop Checker; used to monitor the CO2 levels in your water column. Blue means no CO2, forest green means perfect CO2, yellow means too much CO2

Bubble counter for the aquarium

A: CGA320 Adapter; This is used to connect a solenoid CO2 regulator to a paintball tank

B: Check valve; Prevents water to backflow into the solenoid/CO2 tank thus damaging the entire unit

C: Bubble Counter; Measuring device for CO2 flow rate into your tank. Measured in units of bubbles per second

Conclusion

Hopefully this helps someone out and they can better navigate themselves into setting up there own pressurized planted tank CO2 system at home! Be mindful that, you can replace the paintball tank with any size you wish. This is especially important to consider for the larger tanks, since you will be using CO2 much faster.

The size tank you see in the images are ~5 gallons and the 20oz paintball tank lasts me about 4-5 months.Update