Splitting Air Pump Between Two Tanks

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

JackBinimbul

Aquarium Advice Freak
Joined
Jul 29, 2018
Messages
315
Location
Texas
Alright, so I'm going to assume that what I'm thinking of is probably a bad idea, but I wanted to check in here before nixing it.

I'm going to have a 20g long main tank and a 10g quarantine tank that I may also use to split or propagate plants or give bullied fish a break, etc. The 20 will certainly be planted and the 10 will likely end up being.

I'm going to be using an air pump driven sponge filter. I was wondering if it's possible to use a T juncture to split the airflow to provide pump filtration to both tanks on one pump?

If I were to do so, I assume it would merely half the pump power per tank, so if I were to go with a 20 gallon pump, it would only be 10 and 10 filtration power. Would a 40 pump be the way to go, then? The specific brand I'm looking at has "10-20", "20-40" and "40-60" gallon options.

Is this all a terribly bad idea?
 
I think I used a 20g air pump on a 29g in the past with 3 airstones. I could only open it up about a third. Plenty of power. I'd say you'd probably be fine splitting it. Although I never ran a sponge filter just stones.
 
Doesn't have to be a half and half flow.
You can put a valve in one or both of the lines after the splitter so you can adjust the flow to each tank to what you need, assuming the pump is strong enough.
There is also a gang valve you can install right near the pump that can be adjusted for flows to 2, 3, or more tanks. Maybe more.
These plastic valves are cheap. Amazon has them.
 
Thanks, rlederer. I did more research after this and found out about the control valves! I got the pump for 20-40 gallons and got a set of valves. Glad I asked about it because it saved me a lot of money.
 
Back
Top Bottom