Jestersix

Improvised airstone pump for emergencies

merickson45

Supporting Member
I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this, but I figured I'd share in case it's helpful. It's really only useful for small to medium sized tanks though.

My power went out last night for 13 hours, and I'm a dummy who didn't have any battery powered air pumps (since been rectified). I woke up around midnight because of the heat, and went to check on the tanks. That's when I saw my skunk cleaner shrimp laying on it's side, looking pretty grim. It didn't react to being poked, so I thought that was it. The tank wasn't too hot, so I suspected oxygen depletion from lack of flow.

I started thinking about what I had around that I could use to try saving it, and somehow I thought about sticking an airstone on some tubing and attaching it to a turkey baster. I poked a little hole in the tubing so it wouldn't suck water back up when reinflating the baster. See pics.

Then I immersed the airstone next to the shrimp, covered the tiny hole with my finger, squeezed the baster to make bubbles, uncovered the hole, released the baster to reinflate, and repeated for a while. Pretty soon, the shrimp started twitching and after a few minutes it was back to normal.

I then used it to aerate my tanks every couple hours until I was able to pick up the battery powered pumps. I'm pretty sure it saved both my tanks, or at least greatly reduced the impact of the long time without flow. Everything is looking great today, as if nothing happened :)

Anyways, if you're a dummy in a pinch like me, hopefully this helps.
 

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