Help me decide which pump.

ccLansman,

If you are thinking of setting up the pumps for circulation only they will not be pushing water through any sort of filtration media, so they will not be seeing much of anything in the way of system head resistance as long as you are going to be making a "closed loop" type of a setup. If I was going to do something like that I would most likely use two of the smaller maxi-jet 900 pumps instead. They pump 230gph each and only draw 8.5w instead of the 20w the larger maxi-jet draws. They use less electricity because their max head rating is a little less (4' I think). They work great for very low head applications like for supplemental circulation pumps that have basically no head resistance other than that provided by the sizing of the plumbing itself. You could have two pumps running with each of the returns at opposite ends of your tank so the overall water flow can be better distributed, you can actually be flowing more total water, and you can still be drawing less electricity with two pumps than you would with one of the larger maxi-jet pumps. If that ends up being too much water flow for you one of the maxi-jet pumps can be turned off. Just an idea.

Have a good one, Jeremy

P.S.- A little energy saving thing I do (if you are interested in that kind of thing) is that I like having multiple smaller pumps running my tanks so that I can have built-in redundancy in case of pump failure and also so that I can turn off some of the pumps (circulation only, not the filter ones). It saves me some electricity during the "lights off" hours when the tank doesn't need the higher levels of circulation since the plants aren't needing well-distributed CO2. The fish seem to like having a time of rest at night from the higher current levels as well. They end up being more active during the day when the current levels are increased than they would be if the current levels were high all the time. It also works as a good compromise when stocking a tank with fish that like calmer water while still allowing you to have good CO2 mixing during the day for the plants. I will reduce current levels from 10-12x during the day down to 5-6x at night. If you happen to run your CO2 with a solenoid and a timer, just plug one or two or your supplemental pumps into that same timer so the extra circulation turns on and off with the CO2.

 

I set up my surface ripple after watching Tom's 180 gallon for awhile. He has much more ripple than I have, but my tank is only a quarter the size of his. The basic idea is to keep the surface water moving, with a higher than normal surface area, so it absorbs more oxygen from the air, and releases more CO2 to the air. (The latter can be seen as wasting CO2, but it also establishes lower concentration of CO2 near the surface, so that area can be a sanctuary for the fish to get away from the higher concentration lower in the tank.)

 

I ran a mag 5 on an AM1000 with no issues. Just remember to use a throttle valve and maybe a bypass if the pump is too much.......