To us, aquarium plumbing is like Lego. Lock us in a room with a box of fittings and we’ll play with it all day. And maybe build a few contraptions out of it too. And the mere sight of this nifty little hose valve from Sera has us thinking of all the aquatic conundrums we could use it for.
It’s basically a hose splitter like a standard “Y” or “T” fitting, only as the illustration shows it doesn’t just T-off 12mm or 16mm flexy hose, it massively reduces it down to 4mm at the same time. And that offers new possibilities. 4mm is the internal diameter of a standard airline but also dosing tube and other small pipes we use in both fresh and saltwater aquatics. We use it to move either air, carbon dioxide, or in this case small amounts of water.
Now reducing T pieces are no big deal. Aqua Medic has provided them for years, but it’s the fact that this one is a valved reducing T that enables adjustable water flow from just a few drops to 50lph, according to Sera. Right off the bat, an airline could be connected to it for drip acclimation of mobile invertebrates, or a feed could be taken to fish or inverts in isolation boxes for better water flow through.
Not as accurate or as measured as a dedicated dosing pump, it could supply a calcium reactor with a drip-water feed too, instead of the old-fashioned siphon technique. No power cords are necessary and we found this one on sale for around £10/$13.
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