Long before we had purpose built equipment and devices, the general aquarium hobby was grown and built off a DIY ethos with lots of improvisations and freestyling along the way. Now that we have a huge catalog of aquarium accessories, we can still look towards other fields for gizmos and tricks that make our lives easier, such as the very interesting drill pump.
Many of us might have an assortment of pumps and powerheads that we can use to transfer liquids from one area to another, or to drain hard to reach spots like a low sitting sump or tall, internal overflow boxes. Sometimes it’s not practical to set up a whole powerhead, tube it up and plug it in, this is where the Drill Pump can really shine.
Costing as little as $5 up to $20 or more, this handy accessory is really practical for those cases when you really need to suck up water from some inaccessible areas. As the name implies, it’s basically a pump with a bit to attach a drill, preferably the cordless kind, so you can easily transfer water from one area to another.
The freshwater aquarists have known about this handy trick for jumpstarting the siphon of their beefier canister filters, but it should be employed much more widely in the reef aquarium hobby as well. Aquascaping legend Oliver Knott highlights the usefulness of of using a pump drill around an aquarium in his latest video.
Interestingly, the pump drill looks pretty much exactly like a flowmeter for monitoring flow rates through a pump, minus the sensors to ascertain the exact RPM. Even if you don’t use it that often, those few times you do use it will make it well worth the very modest investment to have this device in the good ole aquarium toolbox.
