Micanopy, Florida based Ocean Habitats, Inc., which has made and installed more than 10,000 of its water-cleansing Mini Reefs throughout Southwest Florida and beyond, is now selling and installing “nanobubbler” machines, including two at the home of Marco Island resident Chris Vines, the first installation of the new technology on Marco Island.
According to the Dr. David Wolff, founder and CEO of Ocean Habitats, the nanobubbler unit pulls water from the canal, hyper oxygenates it and releases the water back into the bottom of the canal, where the bubbles sink due to their tiny size, each bubble literally smaller than a virus.
The bubbler releases a milky colored plume of bubbles that settles on the canal bottom and oxygenates it.
“Once oxygen is covering the formerly anoxic bottom, bacteria are able to bloom and eat the bottom muck,” Wolff said. “This allows canals to return to their sandy bottom and water quality goes through the roof.”
The bubblers are made by Hawthorn, California based Molear Inc., which
develops industrial-scale nanobubble technology that helps deliver improvements in chemical-free water treatment, sustainable food production and the recovery of natural resources.
Ocean Habitats sells two nanobubbler units from Molear, the large “Clear” model, costing roughly $20,000 for purchase and installation, and the smaller “Kingfisher” model, selling for just under $10,000.
Vines, who has a number of Mini Reefs installed under his dock, had two of the Kingfisher models installed on the dock. An avid fisherman with a personal commitment to helping improve Marco’s waterways, he says he’s already seeing a significant improvement in the water quality in his canal after only one month of use.
“The water quality on Marco has been slipping over time and getting worse,” he said. “We used to see bait in here all the time, with hundreds of fish all around the lights at night and now you rarely see fish.” With the nanobubblers, he said he’s seeing clearer water behind his home than the rest of the canal and that more mangrove snappers and threadfin herring have been frequenting his dock.
“We can sit out here at night with a glass of wine and watch the fish around the lights again,” he said.
Vines says he’s hoping that more Marco residents will follow his lead and take action on their own to help improve Marco’s waterways. “When my neighbors start coming back down from the north for the season, I can say, ‘hey look, this is doing something’” to help with water quality.
Wolff’s goal is to install 100 of the nanobubblers in Florida in the short term and is already getting interest from homeowners.
“Canals like the ones here in Marco have 70 years with all kinds of things ending up in the canals and rotting, making the water anoxic,” he said. “It really doesn’t go away and when it gets hot in the summer, you get bubbles that surface and smell bad. We’re trying to eliminate that by having oxygen go across the bottom and eat all that stuff, hopefully getting back to sand down there instead of muck.”
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