Food-grade bucket 10L

Performance & sizing

Core numbers for matching this unit to your tank and electrical plan.

Power

—

Flow rate

—

Noise

—

Dimensions

—

Price range

—

Tank fit (L)

—

Consumables & maintenance

Follow the manufacturer schedule for seals, impellers, media, and other consumables.

Description

Food-grade is a claim about the plastic, not about the bucket's fitness for fish, and the gap between those is where the useful part of this row lives. Most buckets are polyethylene or polypropylene, and the United States rule covering them is 21 CFR 177.1520, which permits those olefin polymers in articles intended for use in contact with food provided they meet the specifications and test methods the section sets out. It sits in the chapter on indirect food additives, whose whole subject is what can migrate out of a polymer into whatever it is holding. That is a genuine assurance and a narrow one. It says the container is not expected to leach into its contents. It says nothing about what the last owner kept in it, and a bucket that has held detergent is not made safe by the resin it was moulded from. The aquarium half of the claim comes from the Merck Veterinary Manual's biosecurity guidance, which names buckets in the same breath as nets and siphons: equipment a quarantine tank keeps for its own exclusive use, disinfected and stored dry once the quarantine ends. Merck sets a minimum quarantine of 30 days. A bucket moved back and forth between the quarantine tank and the display tank is one of the easier ways to spend those 30 days achieving nothing. There is a third use tucked into Merck's tank volume sidebar. Where a tank or pond is an awkward shape, the manual suggests timing how long a known volume takes to fill, using a graduated cylinder or a five-gallon bucket, and deriving the system volume from that. A bucket whose capacity you have actually checked is a measuring instrument, which matters every time a dose is written per litre.

Sources

• merckvetmanual.com — https://www.merckvetmanual.com/exotic-and-laboratory-animals/aquarium-fish/management-of-aquarium-fish
• ecfr.gov — https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-177/subpart-B/section-177.1520

Figures on this page were read off these pages. Manufacturers and databases do change or retire pages; if a link is dead, tell us with the correction link below.