Pet Forum / Aquaria / General / July 2008

In message
<9a72ada2-17bb-4cd2-939c-2ec015749bb4@l64g2000hse.googlegroups.com>,
gargoyle47 <gjdcatman@yahoo.co.uk> writes

They wear quite quickly and a dirty airstone etc can cause the pump to
have to work harder. Both lead to noise.

Personally I've never found any pump regardless of the price I paid that
was "Whisper quiet" for very long :-)

Mind you I haven't used one for years. I find a decent pump and filter
is all I need and that is completely silent.

When a friend of mine owned a fish store, back in the 70's, he used a
smog pump off an auto and ran by an electric motor.

Of course, it made a lot of noise--but then the amount of air it gave
off was phenomenal!  And, of course, he had it located outside the
building ... if I remember correctly, 2 or three of these home-brew
units supplied abundant air for all the aquariums.

Regards,
JS

When I had 50 tanks I used an air pump from an old magnetic tape unit
use on a mainframe computer. The pump had a 5" diameter steel
diaphragm. It wasn't too noisy for the huge amount of air it produced.
Now I only have one tank but I am still using a diaphragm pump. It is
a 20 year old Rena pump. When it is on a foam rubber base it is
reasonably quiet.

I once had a carbon vane rotary pump that was almost silent when new
but as the vanes started to wear it got a bit noisy. I could never get
it to run quietly again even with new vanes.

My experience with piston pumps is that they are noisy but at a much
lower frequency than the 50Hz buzz from diaphragm pumps.

One thing I noticed is that the air pipes can give off a buzz. Careful
positioning is the way to avoid that.

Steve