I promise a picture tomorrow
Really. Until then, here is the quick "what's up":
The design changed quite a bit from that original picture, the unit is now a board mount reactor that can be attached to the wall, the carbon post filter, ozone generator, air pump and all tubing/check valves etc are attached to the board as well making it a very sleek and user friendly design. We have several units in long term testing now. The reaction chamber of the first unit we plan to release is 4.5" OD x 18" tall. This size unit I am running on my personal tank (600g) with 200mg/hr ozone and has performed very nicely and is pretty much ready for release. The same size reactor would work perfectly on smaller tanks with lower ozone input. It requires a moderate pressure pump (8' head) in the 500-600gph range to feed it (eheim 1260, mag7, etc.). With this dedicated pump the normal operating pressure is 3psi. All of the back pressure is created with engineered plumbing rather than valves, making the design easy to use as well as cheaper to own, the down side of this is it has taken far longer to get out of the beta stage than we would like. Justin runs a 14" OD x 60" reactor of the same design in the greenhouse and has had similar great results. We are manufacturing our own "bio-bale" type media and can cram 3x more volume of media into the same space of the "other" manufactures media. This results in more fine droplets dripping through the reactor, which results in more efficient use of the ozone/gram.
Both Justin and I have been working on ozone calculations and reactor design for over two years. There has been a lot of thought put into our design as well as how exactly a reactor should be appropriately sized for an aquarium. We plan to share a lot of those calculations in the coming months since there is very little documentation on the subject.
So how close is it? Don't rush art, you get bad art
The reactor running on my personal tank is coming offline tomorrow (since I promised a pic) and will not be going back on. Next step is to build 5-10 production units for customers who have been waiting a long time for these. After packing, shipping, instruction manuals are done we will go into production for the AVAST built (expect preorders to start around Halloween). Once we have a handle on the production and inventory we can then release the YOU built units (think decorated pine trees and colored lights). Typically we like to build a few hundred in the shop before we kit any item, this really helps us (and you) with troubleshooting and build support. It also allows us to negotiate better prices with our suppliers and pass the savings along on the kits.
Hope that answered a few questions, if anyone has further comments/questions please feel free to join into the conversation.
Dan
