Lifts waste off the floor using nothing but bubbles.
No motor and no impeller, so nothing can be pulled in and injured. That is why an air driven sponge filter is the standard choice for fry, shrimp and long finned fish.
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Design: Single bowl
Why you'll love it
An air driven filter keeps the only powered part, the pump, outside the water and on a bench. For a fry tank or a shrimp tank that is the safest arrangement there is.
Powered internal filters are the classic way to lose baby shrimp and newborn fry. Air lift flow is gentle enough that it moves waste without moving livestock.
The same bubble column that drives the filter breaks the surface and shifts gas exchange, so one air pump covers both jobs on a small tank.
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Air released at the bottom of a vertical tube rises, and as it does it drags water up with it. That draws more water in at the base, which pulls it through the sponge or media on the way. The whole thing runs on the buoyancy of the bubbles, with no moving parts anywhere in the water.
The flow is gentle, which is exactly the point. There is no impeller to injure anything, no intake slot narrow enough to trap a shrimp, and no jet on the return. What you lose is throughput: this will not polish water the way a canister does, and it is not the right filter for a heavily stocked display tank.
Fry are the obvious case. Newly hatched fish are small enough to pass through most intake strainers, and a powered filter in a breeding tank steadily removes the fry you were trying to raise. The same applies to shrimplets, which disappear into a canister without the keeper ever seeing it happen.
Bettas are the other. They are poor swimmers with large fins, and a current that a tetra would ignore leaves a betta pinned against the glass. An air driven filter gives full biological filtration with almost no flow, which is the combination that tank needs.
More intakes means more water drawn per minute for the same air supply, which suits a slightly larger tank or a more heavily stocked grow out. A single intake is plenty for a nano, a betta tank or a quarantine box, and it is less obtrusive in a small setup.
Neither includes an air pump, so budget for one alongside. The flow can be tuned with a valve on the airline, which is worth having for a shrimp tank where even bubble driven flow can be more than you want, and it lets you turn the noise down as well.
In the box
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The details
Squeeze the sponge out in a bucket of water taken from the tank during a water change, then put it straight back. Never rinse it under a tap: chlorine kills the bacterial colony living in it, and in an air driven filter that sponge is the entire biological capacity of the tank.
Once a month is usually enough, and a slightly dirty sponge filters better than a scrupulously clean one because the trapped detritus adds surface area. Clean it when the flow visibly slows rather than on a fixed schedule, and check the airline has not worked loose at the same time.
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The filter itself is clever, the bubbles lift water up the cone and the muck drops into the chamber rather than getting chopped up. What caught me out is that no pump comes with it, and my little single outlet one barely turned it over. On a bigger pump it moves properly.
I set up a grow out tank in the spring and did not want a powered filter anywhere near newly hatched fish. This runs off an air line with the pump sitting on the bench, so there is no motor in the water at all. Three months on and the fry are all still accounted for.
Every fortnight I lift the chamber out and there is a surprising amount of solid waste sitting in it instead of having been ground back into the water. It tips into a jug in about ten seconds and goes straight back on. The bio media section has stayed put through every clean.
Filtration is fine and it does aerate at the same time, which saved me running a separate stone. At about 370 g it is very light, so until I wedged it behind a rock it kept wandering when the flow came on. Not a fault exactly, just something to plan for.
The whole reason I wanted the air driven sort was losing babies to a powered filter intake. The lift here is gentle enough that shrimplets wander over the cone and carry on. It still shifts waste off the floor, which was the other half of the job.
I went for the three intake version for a longer tank and it pulls from both ends rather than just the middle. Runs off one outlet of my pump with room to spare. Cleaning is a case of unclipping the chamber and rinsing the media in old tank water.
No complaint about how it filters, the cone does exactly what the description says. The noise comes from the air breaking the surface above it, so I ended up throttling the line a little to calm things down. Quieter now and it still lifts waste fine.
Before this I had a sponge filter and a separate air stone fighting over the same pump. This does both jobs because the bubble column that drives it also breaks the surface. Freed up an outlet and tidied the back of the tank considerably.
It is a neat unit and the plastic feels solid rather than brittle. The bio media chamber holds less than I assumed from the photos, so I topped mine up with ceramic rings from another filter. Once packed it has run steadily since spring.
Good questions
No, this is the filter unit alone, deliberately. The supplier bundles it with air pumps of unstated voltage, so we sell it bare and pair it with our own USB or 240 V pumps instead.
Any aquarium air pump with a spare outlet. Our USB pump drives the single intake version on a small tank; the triple wants the mains pump.
Empty the solids chamber weekly. Rinse the bio media in old tank water only, because under a tap the chlorine kills the bacteria that make it work.
No, the pump is separate. Any small aquarium air pump will drive it, and a flow valve on the line is worth adding so you can tune the rate.
A modest one. These need volume rather than pressure, so a small single outlet pump is usually plenty for a single filter in a nano or betta tank.
Roughly monthly, or when flow visibly drops. Squeeze it in old tank water only, never under the tap, since the sponge holds the tank's entire bacterial colony.
Last reviewed 30 August 2026
Advice
Bettas survive in bowls, which is why they're sold with them. Surviving and living well are different things, and the gap is about twenty pounds of equipment.
7 min read