You can use an air pump to power your air stones or filters. To make the connections, you will need airline tubing. One of the most popular products currently available in this category is the Penn-Plax Standard Airline Tubing.
You can take a look at this review from Aquarium Blueprints to see whether or not this tubing is worth getting.
Quick Summary
While the Penn-Plax Standard Airline Tubing is cheaper than a vast majority of branded alternatives, we found that the inner diameter to be too small to easily fit into 3/16 inch inlets and outlets. Furthermore, the plastic materials resulted in permanently protruded openings that we have to cut off in order to reconnect the airline tubing any time we need to remove our sponge filters for cleaning.
So, instead of getting the Penn-Plax Standard Airline Tubing, we recommend getting silicone tubing as the material is more flexible. As a result, it is more suitable for sponge filters as you constantly have to unplug and re-plug the tubing in order to perform maintenance.
If you don’t plan on unplugging and re-plugging the tubing constantly, then the Penn-Plax Standard Airline Tubing should work fine.
If you are interested, you can purchase the product on Amazon with this link. (#CommissionsEarned)
Variations
The Penn-Plax Standard Airline Tubing comes in three different lengths as you can get one that is 8-feet long, 25-feet long or even 500-feet long.
Of course, you can easily cut the tubing, by using a standard scissors, in order to shorten the length if you want to split the air flow and/or create other customizations to the air output.
Material
This product is made completely out of plastic.
Diameters
The Penn-Plax Standard Airline Tubing has an inner diameter of 4 mm. The outer diameter measures in at 6 mm.
What we like about the Penn-Plax Standard Airline Tubing
What we like most about the Penn-Plax Standard Airline Tubing is its affordability as the product is priced lower when compared to a vast majority of other branded alternatives.
The tubing is also clear, which makes it easier to hide in your fish tank if you care about aesthetics.
What we don’t like about the Penn-Plax Standard Airline Tubing
The main issue we have with this tubing is that it is made of plastic.
Since the material is so stiff, we have a very difficult trying to fit the tubing opening into an outlet from our Tetra Whisper Air Pump as well as an inlet from our AQUANEAT Aquarium Bio Sponge Filter.
Although the Penn-Plax Standard Airline Tubing is advertised to be 3/16 inch (or 4.8 mm) for the inner diameter, it is actually more like 2.5/ 15 inch (4 mm). As a result, you need to really force the tubing in order to plug it in certain outlets or inlets.
Even if we managed to fit the tubing, the tubing opening will remain permanently protruded. So, if you decide to remove the tubing from a sponge filter so that you can clean the filter, you will have a very hard time plugging the same tubing back in.
What we eventually did is that we would end up cutting the permanently protruded end of the tubing in order to make the connection easier.
With that said, we ended up switching to a silicone tubing instead to using this product.
