Wavemaker / powerhead

Description

A powerhead is a propeller pump that sits inside the tank and moves water around it. It is not the filter pump and not the return pump, and published systems list it separately from both. A 2026 paper on rearing a photosynthetic sea slug describes a life support system in which a recirculating pump in a reservoir below handles the turnover, and then, to ensure a suitable water circulation within the main aquarium, a powerhead was placed in the main aquarium securing a water flow of up to 1800 L h. Two pumps, two jobs: one moves water through the equipment, one moves it around the room the animals live in. The same paper records the accident that makes a powerhead different from a filter. A mesh screen was used to protect the sea slugs from the power head propeller. The moving part of a powerhead is inside the tank with the animals, and that team put a screen in front of it. Published tanks also use more than one. A 2025 nursery experiment ran four 180 L flow-through tanks, each with two pumps, to keep water moving, and a 2025 tank study kept one powerhead in each tank to maintain circulation and then cleaned the tanks, racks, and powerheads once per week for nuisance algae. The powerheads are on the same cleaning schedule as the tanks themselves. No source here publishes a flow rate per litre of tank, a pulse pattern or a placement rule, so this page gives none. What it can say is what the object is for: a second, in-tank pump whose only job is water movement, guarded where animals can reach it, and cleaned on the same schedule as everything else in the tank.

Sources

• pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12837971/
• pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12304057/
• pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12727833/

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