What power heads are best?? Why Tunze??? This is why!

[slief]

These topics come up all the time here on RC. I've been a long time Tunze user (for very good reason) and I cringe every time I hear or read of people comparing these pumps to those cheap Chinese power heads. A subject came up the other day about which power head is best and figured my reply today to that thread would serve as a testament to Tunze powerhead reliability. As such, I figured I would copy and paste that reply here as well for anybody who is looking in this forum for a good reason why to buy Tunze's vs a cheap powerhead.

For many of us, there is a price to be paid for quality and reliability and I for one will not settle for cheap equipment that is prone to premature failure. My tank and installation dictates that I use the best components that are available to me and these pumps are no exception!

Note: These pictures were taken yesterday. You should never let your Tunze's get this bad! They needed a serious vinegar soak just to get them apart!

For me, it's a no brainer. Tunze's are about the most reliable power heads you can buy and will take more abuse than any pump I've ever seen. I finally got around to cleaning my two Tunze 6205's & one 6105 yesterday after years worth of constant abuse and no cleaning.. These pumps are close to 5 years old and run 0-100% every fraction of second, day in and day out except for at night when they run at 30% and except when other Apex controlled flow profiles kick in for short intervals randomly throughout the day.

That is all coraline buildup and they never skipped a beat and still produced surprisingly good flow without having been cleaned in over 2 years. Let see Jebaos take this kind of abuse.. I bet Jebao's as well as most any other pump would be dead long before they got this bad.

That is over an inch thick of solid coraline growing off the front of this 6105!

And after..

 

[rvitko]

Thank you very much. We face similar decisions every day in all purchases. Do we buy the Craftsman or Snap On wrench or the Sheiss Fo Tzu Brand? If you plan to stay with the hobby you buy the good one, if you are doing serious work, you buy the good one. At least on tools I reasoned the extra expense upfront was offset by potential hospital bills when the cheap one broke and I went flying while bearing down on a bolt. In the long run you do save money when a product is reliable and can be repaired, even good pumps are one of the cheapest parts of this hobby when you consider the investment in livestock. We do tend to get what we pay for and while their is usually a premium attached to quality, that premium more often than not goes to future innovation and R & D, a cost that copying a product does not have.

 

[biecacka]

I shed a tear when I sold my tunzes! But with a rimless tank I wanted no wires showing on the top of the tank. I should have done like Slief and capped some bulkheads and ran the wires through them for directional flow that I'm lacking.
Roger, you are right though, quality is not not always the cheapest, but it's typically more consistent

Corey