How Do You Aerate Your Monster Tank??

[J. H.]

Air pumps offer far more than bubbles. Centralized air pumps are often used to create suction through sponge media.

I have seen various powerheads used to run sponge, box and even canister filters. They work just as well as the airpump/airstone system.

And air pumps are cheaper and use less power.

I will argue with this. While air pumps do use less power per amount of water moved than the old impeller powerheads, the new bladed powerheads from Sunsun, JCB, and Korilina (Maybe others I don't know) are more efficient than air pumps. It is hard to get a straight answer for how much water a sponge filter moves, but if you google "airlift pump efficiency" you can get some equations and stuff to not only optimize your sponge filters and get the most out of them, but also see what the best they can do is. I will admit that I did the numbers looking at diaphram and piston style air pumps, maybe the more efficoent, larger and noisier centrifugal blower pumps will beat bladed powerheads. Again, the new JCB and Sunsun (I think they are the same) can be cheaper than air pumps.
I will admit that the good old fashioned sponge and box filters that run off compressed air are simple, elegant and reliable. I have run tanks on contraptions made of oxygen mask tubes, soda bottles, bits of pvc and an air pump, using an old shirt as mech and packing peanuts and gravel as bio. If you have the air pumps, you can hack together legit filters out of garbage, and they work as well as any other.

 

[badassissimo]

Pondmaster ap 100 and ap 60. Cheap. Moves tons of air. Negatives are they're Loud and the diaphragm blows every 3-6 months.

One thing that's saved me 5 figure losses are having extra compressed oxygen tanks hooked to regulators. I use my old CO2 hydroponic atmospheric regulators. Cheap at indoor gardening store or online. The regulators lead to hose line that T's and splits to multiple airstones which sit in every tank system. We have a lot of storms on the edge of the rainforest so if the power goes out all we have to do is crack the valve on the O2 cylinder and every tank instantly has aeration. 55lb cylinder can last for days on multiple systems. I keep a cylinder of varying size in each fish room ready to go. This is in addition to the airpumps running 247 as a backup.

I have backup propane generators built into our house that my neighbors are trained to start in our absence. But the air tanks are a great backup, instant aeration.

I'm totalling going to go get a bottle. I always use a battery bubbler and it gives me the day in one tank. I'd rather be able to keep my entire system running. We just had an 8 hour power outage in Louisiana and I went to changing a lot of water to make sure whatever bio media died could be filtered out and rebuild before the balance got too far out of zone for my fish. I could probably rig it to a UPS or something and not even worry about if I was there or not. Thank you for the idea! where do I get one? I have the compressor for my car just not the tank.

 

[badassissimo]

Pondmaster ap 100 and ap 60. Cheap. Moves tons of air. Negatives are they're Loud and the diaphragm blows every 3-6 months.

One thing that's saved me 5 figure losses are having extra compressed oxygen tanks hooked to regulators. I use my old CO2 hydroponic atmospheric regulators. Cheap at indoor gardening store or online. The regulators lead to hose line that T's and splits to multiple airstones which sit in every tank system. We have a lot of storms on the edge of the rainforest so if the power goes out all we have to do is crack the valve on the O2 cylinder and every tank instantly has aeration. 55lb cylinder can last for days on multiple systems. I keep a cylinder of varying size in each fish room ready to go. This is in addition to the airpumps running 247 as a backup.

I have backup propane generators built into our house that my neighbors are trained to start in our absence. But the air tanks are a great backup, instant aeration.

I'm totalling going to go get a bottle. I always use a battery bubbler and it gives me the day in one tank. I'd rather be able to keep my entire system running. We just had an 8 hour power outage in Louisiana and I went to changing a lot of water to make sure whatever bio media died could be filtered out and rebuild before the balance got too far out of zone for my fish. I could probably rig it to a UPS or something and not even worry about if I was there or not. Thank you for the idea! where do I get one? I have the compressor for my car just not the tank.

 

[Dieselhybrid]

Hello! Haven't been online much these days. I get my O2 tanks at the welding supply store. I use a regulator from Amazon now. I used to use old atmospheric ones for horticulture but they required power defeating the point. My buddy uses scuba tanks with pressurized atmospheric air from his scuba compressor. Uses a din or yolk valve adaptor. Lots of options

 

[alecrromine]

the surface of my sump moves fast through the baffles so I don't do anything additional, just run the two jaebo dct4000s