DWC AIR PUMP Question:

Greetings,

I have buckets and lids for a 10 (5) gallon
DWC or ( eventually ) an under current DWC.

I'll be starting out with 10 buckets and thru
either human or natural error, I'll probably end
up with 4 or 5 female buckets.

QUESTION: What's the right size air pump ?

- I'm using 4" bubble disks.

and I've almost bought the 70, 88 & 110 Liter units
but hesitated at the last minute because I would
prefer to make this purchase only once ( for some time )

and want to try to keep HEAT & NOISE to a minimum.

So,, not more than 10 buckets,
a 4" disk per bucket, what is the right ( not too powerful )
air pump, that is powerful enough to blow acceptable bubbles in all buckets.

Thank You in advance for your suggestions.

Cheers

3.2to5 lpm per bucket

I bought a bunch of aquarium air pumps, tetra whisper 60-100, I believe. They are decent aquarium pumps around $30 at the pet store. First I had 1 pump for 2 buckets, then I went with 1 pump per bucket then went to 2 pumps per bucket. Finally I broke down and bought a serious pump . It is a sunleaves dura pump 1030gph. And it is much better than the aquarium ones. I believe when your dwc growing the more bubbles the better, I try to keep that water boiling with bubbles.
So spend the $50 and get a serious pump, this one will boil around 4-6 5gal buckets.

Also the sunleaves pump is louder and hotter, but not to bad, I can't hear it with the door open I room away. I also put it on a piece of insulation foam to keep the vibration noise down.

Your gonna want a commercial pump for all 10 buckets, or use 10x the power and run 10 pumps, but silent on an air pump your not going to get unless you go with 1 pump per 1 or 2 buckets.

I have a 4 bucket system and use a commercial 40LPM 6 valve pump, now you can get a 10 port valve for these (or two 6's) and run all your pumps. It's far from silent, and it does vibrate a bit. I paid $45 or $49 for mine from a hydro shop, but I got one on ebay this past week for $13 plus $13 shipping that's a 35LPM (40 watts) So you can pick them up fairly resonably, but like I said, unless your going with multiple whisper pumps, your going to have some noise. Mine is sitting 2 rooms away, roughly 15 feet, and I can hear the hum, in the room it's loud, but you get used to it.

You can mount them on rubber feet which helps. When I move (less than a month now) I'll be mounting it to a plastic shelf using rubber feet, and the plastic shelf will be mounted as well using rubber feet. This SHOULD help keep the vibration down, but I'll still be able to hear the pump. I'm sure you can build custom housing for it if you want to, I don't really care about this for my use, but the vibration honestly is worse than the noise (or a large contributing factor to it)

Also, if your running 10 buckets, why a DWC and not an RDWC? I run 4 buckets in an RDWC and I couldn't imagine doing the swap out without my controller bucket

low-rdr see if you can find a polyurethane or silcone based plastic(the kind that feels more rubbery) for the shelf. regular hard plastic will amplify the sound/vibration like the top of an acoustic guitar... i forget youre an engineer you probably already knew that

Yeah, my pump and ballast(s) will both be on poly plastic. The smaller pumps will just be sitting on a wooden shelf, they don't vibrate much at all, and already come with decent rubber feet. I MAY however put these on those rubber non slip mats as well.