Carbon dioxide and snails

The zebra nerite snails are happily munching the algae from the walls of my planted tank. I love them! But the sad thing is that the larger one has tons of chips and pits in his shell. We didn't notice them when we fished him out of the container in the store. The trouble with this very popular store is that there is absolutely ZERO space, it is overcrowded, AND you have to fish out your own fish or other water critters. So I was butt-to-butt with several people and trying desperately to dislodge a stubborn snail from the side of the container. People were also waiting for the net, so I rushed and got myself a snail with a bad shell. I hope that he'll be ok; I have to get some calcium for his poor shell.

This is a badly taken photo; I wanted to show how the shrimp seem to like to clean the snail's shell.

They're going to be well fed indeed. The walls get completely covered with a furry carpet of algae in the space of a week, the algae is so out of control. The problem is that I have such high lighting (3.5 W/gallon) and not enough fast growing plants. Also, I didn't have CO2 injection until recently. DIY CO2 just didn't cut it, and the algae grew strong and free.

I've set up the inline reactor which mixes the CO2 with water in order to efficiently dissolve it. I got a cheap powerhead, and it's working a charm! Only thing, the inlet has holes big enough for shrimp and guppy/platy fry to get sucked in. So I'm looking for pantyhose. No, I don't have any. I covered the inlet with a thing I bought today from a local market-type area. The picture suggested that it was stockings, showing a pair of sexy and womanly legs. But the label suggested that it was something else with a more geriatric purpose: "100% support velvet socks". It turned out to be more towards the geriatric side. It will work for the interim, but it is butt ugly!

The powerhead pumps the water from the reactor into the tank. I got some stuff to attach the tube to the wall so the outlet doesn't look so ugly. I'll cover it with tall plants sometime.

Here's the drop checker, which changes color based on how much CO2 is present in the water. Right now, it's almost blue because I put new solution in not long ago.

So now, the tank looks like this: