The Newbie Corner – The First Law of Thermodynamics

Listen up class, professor ocellaris is here with the first installment of the Newbie Corner. Today’s lesson The First Law of Thermodynamics.

We all know that being a successful reef keeper involves talents in many fields, biology, fluid mechanics, electronics, control systems, aquatic life sociology. One field that seams to get overlooked is thermodynamics, especially by the newbies. Understanding one basic principle of thermodynamics is crucial to solving most of the questions I get asked by people starting out. Ready for it……

The First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change forms.

What does this have to do with reef keeping? Simple all the energy that we put into our tanks (food, light, water motion) is either going to stay in there (fish growth, coral growth, water heat) or come out (skimmate, frags, warming up our cold houses). This principal is especially useful when trying to solve algae problems.

We give our glass boxes food, which ends up as poop. The poop ends up as food for algae or other organisms / bacteria (I’m looking at you Kole Tang).  We also give our reefs light, lots of light. Now we’ve added everything needed to make your display look like a fuzzy forest. This is where the first law steps in. If you don’t want the nuisance algae to grow we need to export its fuel. Generally we attach the nutrients (as keeping the proper spectrum lights on looks nice). There are many ways to export the by-products of the food we put in, and I’ll focus on my two favourite; skimming and harvesting macro algae. Skimming will catch most of the DOC (Dissolved organic carbon) including organic phosphates, while the macro algae will catch the inorganic phosphates and other nutrients when given sufficient lighting. The point here is that whatever we put into our systems has go to come out in one way or another if we don’t want something else to grow in the system.

Before I start a riot, I realize that there are many ways to export nutrients from our systems. Some are efficient, some are safe, and some require tons of maintenance. Pick your poison, at the end of the day before we get carried away by the details we need to remember what we’re after. Calorie per Calorie (Joule per Joule for the hardcore) what we put in has to come out.

So to everyone starting out lets understand the principals so that we can come up with informed solutions to the issues which may arise, maybe then I won’t hear “My algae is out of control should I use Vodka?” as often.

Related posts:

1. The Newbie Corner – SPS Can Sting
2. STN and The Real Issues, part 3
3. Glaciers to Reefs; the ocean is one big eco-system (duh)
4. STN and The Real Issues, part 2
5. Beating the Dreaded Red Death!

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