Recommendations For A New Air Pump For My Fishtank

I can't help you with the pump, except to point out that quiet ones seem to be hard to find.  However, you don't need to worry about multiple outputs. You can get something like this to provide as many airlines as you desire from any pump.

Sadly, it doesn't work like that.  Chlorine is dissolved in the water from your tap, just as oxygen and carbon dioxide may be. Putting an airline in the bucket agitates the surface and promotes gas exchange at the surface; Oxygen goes from air to water and carbon dioxide and chlorine go from water to air. So it will dechlorinate your water. However, the water treatments that you add also do things with heavy metal ions like lead and copper that are also dissolved in the water. It's called chelating and I don't have a clue how it works; It would take a chemist, like Sue, to explain it better.

And air pumps don't get rid of chloramine for those regions where the water company uses that.


The dechlorinator I use contains the sodium salt of EDTA (ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) which is indeed a chelating agent. This was my husband's area of work more than mine; some chemicals are very good at reacting with metal ions to form complex which effectively removes metal ions from the water where they can harm the fish. Or more usually, invertebrates. Shrimps, snails and things like corals and anemones in salt water tanks are susceptible to metal ions such as copper.

I already have a splitter Steve and it works ok if both airstones are roughly the same level but I've found it useless if one is going in water at a much lower level, the higher airstone hogs all the air..unless I'm doing it wrong.

I use aerated dechlorinated water without water conditioners in Franks tank then I can shift the nerites I have in there when I want to use meds in another tank. Assassin snails have proved to be impervious to the effects of eSHa2000 thankfully as I don't want them in the other tanks.

I checked my water supplier and they use chlorine, after 12hrs of vigorous aeration the chlorine disperses, it's faster than waiting for it to go naturally which takes roughly 3 days, hence Pets at Home advice to leave tanks running empty for 3 days before adding fish.

I shall continue the quest for a cheap quite pump, I already have an Interpet Airolution AV2 but it was quite expensive. Thanks for the input guys and gals

Ahhh okey dokey, I'll get another splitter then and have a fiddle