Review on 🐠 Penn Plax PEN-019 Air Pod Aquarium Air Pump - Power Outage Auto On, Ensures Fish Safety, 55 Gallon Capacity by Kathleen Ledoux

We bought this pump to transport our fish across the country by car from Denver to Pittsburgh. I wanted to have a fish pump that runs on 110V AC supplied by the inverter while the car is in motion and has battery backup when the car is off. This pump kept our fish alive on a trip to Pittsburgh 4 years ago and then recently on our return trip from Pittsburgh to Denver. (By the way, a great way to transport fish is to have a large plastic rectangular storage container that fits inside another, larger storage container. Water that sloshes out of the smaller container ends up in the larger container. Containers are much sturdier than 5- gallon bucket if you need to brake hard). Part of the AC pump failed twice, and each repair required re-soldering the main transformer on the circuit board. Foil traces to a relatively severe transformer rupture due to pump vibration. The first time it was a rail attached to the secondary (low voltage) side and the last time it was a rail attached to the primary (high voltage) side. The repair is trivial: scrape the green solder mask off the undamaged area of the trace and solder a wire to the transformer cable from there, but this is definitely not something most aquarists are willing to do. It took me quite a while to realize that the circuit board itself had failed, not the transformer. This pump has always pumped enough air for our 29 and 37 gallon tanks and is fairly quiet. If the light changes from red to green, that means it's running on batteries and you need to figure out if the power is off (can you see your fish?) or if the AC pump side is bad. I agree. With other reviewers, it would be nice to have an audible alarm that could be turned on and off when the pump is on battery power.