Let’s go for a walk in the park - they just cleaned the algae tanks!
Isn’t spirulina more effective for capturing carbon than trees? And also you can eat it in the way you don’t normally eat trees? Trees are great and all but why do you want me to be angry about algae?
Gooooood Morning Night City!
Algae in water doesn’t burn like trees
Checkmate commies !
It sounded cool a couple of years ago, but it was first installed in 2021 and I’m yet to hear of it really going anywhere.
Why is this on the self hosting community
Self hosting a tree
sigh take your upvote
The water is hosting algae
Looks like one of them fish tank PC cases that are apparently a thing.
self hosting is anti-capitalist, so is being against urban brutalism.
I can kinda see that, yeah. 👍
homeless people find sitting in the shade of trees to be comfortable, and the city whole point of urban design is to make them uncomfortable and to suffer
I think it’s probably cheaper in the long run to self host a tree instead, unless you live in an apartment with absolutely no green space. But I’d rather get a VPF and host a tree there if I had too
Does this count too?
I already posted this on !balconygardening@slrpnk.net. .
I’m purposefully growing duckweed on my balcony.
I’m doing !hydroponics@slrpnk.net, and by doing that, I have lots of waste water with still good fertilizer in it.Duckweed is one of the fastest growing, nutrient densest and least demanding plant out there, and you can just scoop it out with a strainer.
It’s exponentially growing and if you don’t wanna eat it, it makes great organic fertiliser or animal feed with lots of protein and micronutients!
I had the same reaction until I read this.
TL;DR: it’s 10-50x more efficient at cleaning the air and actually generates both electricity and fertiliser.
Yes, it would be better to just get rid of all the cars generating the pollution in the first place and putting in some more trees, but there are clear advantages to this.
How long does it take to break even from the pollution and electricity spent to make and install these?
I appreciate Rebecca Watson’s opinion. Watched the 6min video, now convinced 👍
Also learned a new term: kneejerk cynicism
It provides fertilizer but needs “some food”.
How much food and what is it?
Typically for aquariums you have to feed these things fertilizer so it seems odd
It’s just some circle of life stuff, fertilizer, carbon dioxide, light in, The algae produces more algae. It loads up on a bunch of carbon, some of the bloom dies off, by removing it, you take the carbon with it along with some of the fertilizer components. You add a little more fertilizer in and the algae blooms more and sucks up more carbon dioxide.
How much food and what is it?
…Did we mention it doubles as a convenient dumping ground for mob snitches?
It’s not an either/or thing, the tank in the picture is literally sitting under a tree
Short answer: the bank won’t give your shiny new tree-planting business a loan as easily as it will to a “liquid tank tree replacement” one.
Long answer:
- Trees take time to grow
- Trees need to be planted
- Trees make shade
- Animals like birds and insects like bees and mosquitos like to live next to them
- Trees don’t need electricity
- Trees take in heat radiated from the pavement
- Trees don’t look cool
While algae are more efficient at turning CO2 into oxygen in theory, in practice algae don’t have a good climate in such a tank (no oxygen without ventilation, i.e. constant electricity and they get cooked through the glass).
All in all, more of a gimmick than anything.
Roots limit where they can grow without messing up infrastructure.
Yeah this is a big problem I see often. You have underground utilities? Tree planting becomes a huge thing. And in a lot of these walkable areas, places you’d want trees, folks tend to also prefer not to have the wires overhead with telephone poles everywhere, and so they’ve been backed into a corner.
I did just sit through a presentation by my local environmental commission where they addressed the issue. The solution seems to be trees bred for the specific environment: deciduous provides shade but doesn’t drop a lot of leaves; can grow tall but the root ball grows in a certain way so as not to interrupt sidewalks and utilities; hearty and resilient. I can’t recall the trees, but they were described as essentially not naturally occuring.
Trees don’t look cool
You take that back!
was about to furiously reply with the same retort… but yeah. I LOVE green spaces
- Trees take time to grow
Sure, of course not removing literally all of them in the first place is preferable but hindsight is 20/20 I guess. And good things come to those who wait.
- Trees need to be planted
True, planting a tree seems a bit easier than installing a weird tank though, despite time to grow.
- Trees make shade
Good.
- Animals like birds and insects like bees and mosquitos like to live next to them
Good.
- Trees don’t need electricity
Good.
- Trees take in heat radiated from the pavement
Good.
- Trees don’t look cool
Bullshit.
Aren’t like half of those bullet points positives? Also in addition to what you said once you got a tree you got a tree, those tanks need constant maintenence and cycling which I doubt anyone is going to bother with for more than a year after installing them.
The comment you replying to was trying to not so subtly point out this is a business plot and little else. Nobody is going to pay a subscription fee to have a tree in front of their business, but they might cough up money for a third party to maintain a tank of algae out front if it was sold right
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Why is this in self hosted?
in case you want to self-host your own algae, I guess
Can I combine this with my water-cooling setup?
Just give me a 4U tank somewhere where someone else can deal with harvesting the algae and a webcam aimed at it and I can enjoy it just fine from here. For me, selfhosting is mostly about the privacy, not principally about needing to be resistant to loss of Internet connectivity or the like.
I have seen a few guides on growing your own algae including from CodySlab.
It has a USB port.
Come on, you know there’s someone out there trying to work out how to selfhost one of these.
I have a birth bath I don’t ever replace the water in. Its like a shrub to me.
birth bath
Uhhhhhh you should probably at least drain out the placenta fluid…
No, it’s essential to the flavor.
You should look up “Walstad planted tank”. An all plants aquarium you don’t ever have to mess with (except to trim if you want to)
I’ve been doing these for years… they don’t work as intended for more than a year or two, and then become pretty unstable. Even the lady who created it went back to low-maintenance (as opposed to zero input) systems after a few years. Still with the dirt and all but not without water movement and stuff.
Awesome! yeah, there’s a variant where you can seal the jar, but for the most part exactly what you said is the norm. I’ve had mine for roughly 5 years now, but I added shrimp and trim it back about once a month or so . I don’t even feed the tank more than a few times a week.
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Wrong community, maybe? Lol
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iirc, algae are better oxygen producers per units of mass and volume, so a tank full of algae might actually be better than a tree. One issue though is that trees can grow on open ground, while algae require a tank to be built, most likely negating the economic benefits. Also, trees are more aesthetically pleasing.
What? You don’t like future jelly tree?
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I like how everyone is acting like it is normal to have this in self hosted
I love this about lemmy.
Like someone stumbling into the wrong house and still being welcomed.
It’s a lot more informal and relaxed than on the piss page of the Internet.
How’s my dog supposed to piss on that
I don’t think your dog will see that as problematic.
