Path: utzoo!hoptoad!amdcad!decwrl!reid
From: reid@decwrl.dec.com (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: alt.aquaria
Subject: Re: what does carbon in a filter do? (AND) Re: "Brown and smelly"
Message-ID: <419@bacchus.DEC.COM>
Date: 4 May 88 05:47:57 GMT
References: <9178@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <4268@super.upenn.edu> <28329@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Reply-To: reid@decwrl.UUCP (Brian Reid)
Distribution: usa
Organization: DEC Western Research
Lines: 12

In article <28329@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Ram-Ashwin@cs.yale.edu (Ashwin Ram) writes:
>You can't regenerate activated carbon.  How often you need to replace it
>depends...

Sure you can. You just bake it in an oven. Chemistry labs all over the world
regenerate it all the time. I haven't got the reference book in front of me
here, but a call to my friend Peter who used to be a chemistry professor got
me the instructions to bake it at 450 for 20 minutes or so, in a glass baking
dish. He says that the trick is to drive the adsorbed molecules out, leaving
behind the activated carbon structure. Also he says that activated carbon and
activated charcoal are the same thing except for the physical shape of the
granules.