Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

On another thread this style of airlift was recently discussed:

http://community.theaquaponicsource.com ... nnMartinez

It appears to be a pulser pump with the additon of an airpump and oneway valve.

Very simple idea but I can't seem to find any details about their performance. Many times the lift or the flow or the power are mentioned but never all three for the same setup.

Can anyone help?

Someone posted a video of one of his air lift pumps a while back.. The stats were not great, there were plenty of submersible pond pumps that were more efficient from memory..

Sounded like he was using a 60 W air pump. On a per-watt basis, even cheap pond pumps should give better flow rates. And I doubt his pump was cheap.

I love the idea of air lifts, but they just don't seem to live up to the advantages people ascribe to them. Seems you'd be better off just using the pump for FT aeration.

I agree but I wanted to know the stats. I'm pretty sure their take on the airlift is not suited to AP but rather low flow higher head applications. Mind you I can't assess that without the details which don't seem to be anywhere convenient to check.

Where their idea does have merit is getting water from a local creek or dam or well without having to use petrol or electricity at the pump.

I am going to try their design and i will post what i end up learning. I am a couple of weeks away from starting my garage breeding/hatchery system. which will use an air lift assuming i can get adequate flow..

The system will be 4 ibc's and 10 blue barrels standing upright... 4 ibcs will be breeder tanks, 3 blue barrels will be fry tanks and 7 blue barrels filled with 1/2" substrate for filtration and grow beds. The blue barrels will be standing straight up.

The water depth will be about 24-27" and the lift should be 6" or less. I have purchased an ecoplus 3 air pump to do my testing with. It's 37 LPM at 2.9psi.. it runs at 18 watts. which if i have done my math right.. at 13cents per kwh will cost about $20.50 a year to run.

The system may run close to 1000 gallons total but i dont have to push that 1k gallons an hour to be successful because i am staggering the tanks/ grow beds and this will be a low density system most of the year.


It's seems to be a powerful little pump. i am excited to get started (and i thought i would already be done with it by now) but spring brings tons of maintenance projects that keep pushing back my hobby projects.

So how is it going?

I ended up using a 35 watt pump but it's doing good. video is in my build thread.

I got 6 seperate system I would like to run all them on air lifts. I can't find any info on Ben and glen either. I know the Koi guys use the air lifts too but that is in another language. Anyone with any info I would be very glad for a heads up.