There is a school of thought referred to as R.A.I.P., or Redundant Arrays of
Inexpensive Pumps. RTB explained it nicely above; Joe also has a very good
idea. Many of us start off with pumps that were easily "findable", like the
Little Giants or Beckett pumps. But these are inefficient
operating-cost-wise. It's a good idea to do as Joe suggests: replace it
with an efficient pump, and place the other in storage as a back-up. It's
also nice to have another pump to run a quarantine or hospital tank . . .

Lee

"Scott Evans" wrote in message
...
In a recent posting here, someone had lost their pump, and was wondering
what needed to be done to keep their fish safe until a replacement could
be found/installed. That got me thinking (never a good thing, but I
digress) a bit about how to minimize the short-term impact of a pump
failure. Going under the assumption that it takes a certain amount of
power to pump a given quantity of water, would it make more sense to
have multiple smaller pumps hooked up in parallel (with appropriate
back-flow check valves) rather than a single large pump? It shouldn't
take any more power to pump the water; the only additional cost would
be the initial plumbing and pump costs. It might be a worthwhile
tradeoff for peace-of-mind to put out a little more money upfront to
make sure that a pump failure won't take down a whole pond ecosystem.

Comments?

Scott