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Coral Vue Hydros

Best quiet air pump for culture oxygenation?


DaJMasta

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I'm a month and change into a phytoplankton/zooplankton culture setup and have some cultures going at a reasonable rate and a method developed, but it's being done on a short shelf in my main room and the air pump is a tad noisy.

 

I've got 8 one gallon jug cultures and am using a Danner AP-8 pump to aerate them.  The air is enough, but is lower than I would like (can't really turn it up to get things moving more), but above maybe 50% it's notably louder than I'd like.  Does someone have a good recommendation for a quiet air pump that can supply a substantial amount of air to these cultures?  The AP-8 supposedly runs at about 140gph and up to 2psi.

I don't need a battery backup included, I got a UPS for the rack after the third major outage in six months... but something that will easily integrate to standard sized airline tubing would be nice, and ideally all outputs from the same one unit.

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Do either of those options have quiet high power versions, though?  I've got a small tetra whisper and it's great for noise, but I think I'd probably need an AP-300 or more to be comparable to the Danner, and I don't know if those big units are as quiet.  I'd probably need like 4 of those Uniclife pumps to keep everything moving and while I suppose it's possible, a single plug and module would definitely be more convenient.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I looked into the options for a bit and then remembered some recommendation for a pump in a MACNA talk about breeding.  Digging through it again, I found the recommendation was for a linear air pump, and when I looked into it, the price was comparable to a bunch of smaller ones but it was advertising low power consumption, low noise, and high air output (flow and pressure), so I went for one and bought an Alita AL-15 with a 12 way manifold.

 

The pump itself is quieter, though maybe not as much as the specifications suggest, but it's substantially more powerful.  With the AP-8 and two bottles on each output, I had to balance the valves on each bottle carefully to make sure bubbles were in both, especially when the water levels were different, and a moderate level of agitation was as much as I could achieve.  Now I've got more outputs going through 50mm, 0.2um filter disks to keep out contaminants and which require more pressure for reasonable flow, and I can get substantially more air into each bottle when fully open, and leaving outputs entirely open does not noticeably reduce the output on any of the others.  I've even ran an airline across the room to my algae scrubber in my main tank, formerly running on a Tetra AP150, and I think it's pushing even more air through than before.

Could be a bit quieter, but my air needs are surpassed for all the plankton culturing I'm hoping to do here, and I've even got a spare output for aerating acclimation buckets or whatnot.

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