Michigan Cichlid Association
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Jaws22 on August 23, 2013, 10:11:24 AM
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What size air blower would I need to run 100 to 120 stacks. The biggest tanks I have are 12) 50s the rest are smaller. Thanks Johnny.
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I responded to this when I was up north, but for some reason it didn't post. You should be fine with an 1/8hp Gast blower.
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So, im thinking my 1/2 horse will do like 150+.
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I briefly started to look into this back when Ski posted the question about the larger blower he'd obtained. I couldn't find a site that would relate the HP ratings to either a number of tanks or a number of drops. Knowing what volume of air can be moved at a given pressure is more important. Then the efficiency of the pump can be taken into account to derive what the necessary real world HP.
So what volume can they push? A CFM rating usually isn't too hard to find. Now, finding chart relating volume to pressure, that's a bit harder. Then to find some answers we'll also need the number of tanks, the lengths of the air line(s), the diameter of the airline(s), and the depths of the drops in the tanks. From this we can find the pressure exerted on the blower and the rate of air exiting all of the drops in the tanks.
But at this point I realized, there's a lot of math here and I'm not setting up a blower for myself, so I stopped trying to find the answer. But perhaps this helps give some idea of what to consider if you try crunching the numbers for yourself. :P
IMO if you have a fishroom, a large linear air pump is a better idea. If you have a fish-basement or a fish-building, then a blower is much more fitting.
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I have 115 tanks in my fishroom. Approximately half have at least two filters running, some of the bigger tanks have three or four. In a couple of the deeper tanks, I had to put a brick under the filter to raise it off of the bottom to get air flowing, but part of the reason for this was the length of the airline from the valve to the filter.
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Good info. I think I will be looking at a linear air pump in the future...
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I responded to this when I was up north, but for some reason it didn't post. You should be fine with an 1/8hp Gast blower.
Marty, is that what you are using is an 1/8 hp gast blower?
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Yep.