The Bubble Magus DC pump has been promised for quite some long time now, and we got our first glimpse at the new pump at Reefapalooza 2015. SeaSide Aquatics, distributor of all things Bubble Magus in the U.S. displayed the new BM Curve D8 and D9 which are the first skimmers to use the new BM DC pumps.
Bubble Magus is making two different pumps, the BM DC S20 rated for 900 liters of air per hour at 20 watts, and the BM DC S50 rated for 1500 liters of air per hour at 45 watts. It’s important to note that currently the pumps aren’t available stand alone at all, either as a needle wheel or a centrifugal pump.
There’s a lot of different brands of controllable DC pumps around in the market today but most of them are made by only a handful of companies. And all of these controllable DC pumps are regular water movers that in some cases have been outfitted with a needle wheel for protein skimmers after the fact.
The Bubble Magus breaks the mold by being the first new DC pump we’ve seen which has been designed primarily as a needle wheel DC pump. Bubble magus designed the S20 and S45 with a novel form factor that improves its performance primarily as a needle wheel pump for protein skimmers.
The rounded edges of the volute face and back of the BM DC pump reduce the collection of large bubbles that periodically disrupt the foam collection process. The BM DC pumps also have been designed to be as small overall volume as possible to make it easier to fit them into protein skimmer bodies.
The driver for Bubble Magus’ new DC pumps have the same 6 speeds as many others out there, but these are clearly labeled from 20 to 120 %, and the large dial also serves double duty as a button to enable a feed mode for cup cleaning or simple disruption of protein skimming functions for 10 minutes.
The only other smarts we’ve been able to gather about the S20 and S50 DC pumps is that they have built-in run-dry protection and they will stop working if they sense that they’re out of water. Seeing as it’s taken Bubble Magus two years to release the needle wheel version of the new water pumps, we hesitate to guess at when a regular impeller version might be coming, but we look forward to seeing how well they perform and hold up with the Curve D8 and D9 skimmers they are debuting with.
