Aquarium flow pumps have come a long way in recent years and we love seeing them during unboxings and generally appreciating them as self confessed reef gear junkies. However once they go into use on our tanks, we definitely don’t want to see them anywhere within the display that could distract from our viewing pleasure.
The health of the corals always comes first and sometimes you just can’t help but place flow pumps in conspicuous places for maximum flow generation. However there is some middle ground where you can place pumps in ideal areas of the tank where they will both be producing the kind of flow that your tank needs, but also not be an eyesore in themselves or with the cables and wires they introduce.
We’ve grown very accustomed to never seeing almost any equipment within our own display tanks, see the lengths to which we built a dual closed loop on the bottom of our forthcoming 400 gallon reef tank. Over the years we’ve emphasized discovering these optimum ‘sweet spots’ and it’s caused us to cringe when we see pumps front and center in other reef aquarium displays.
We’ve put together this video to help identify some techniques that can work to hide aquarium flow pumps within a range of different tank setups, and aquascaping layouts. The modern catalog of flow and propeller pumps are incredibly powerful these days and there’s no longer any excuse to have them visible in a way that can detract from our precious corals and fish.
