HI,
I was looking for a low cost external pump to power my in sump skimmer. I found an Iwaki knock off. It is a basic and cheap Chinese made knock off. It's supposed to be from the makers of Blue Line, but there is absolutely no real information on the pump or box. Just a sticker form the importer. On the other hand it's pretty quite with almost no motor noise, just a mild swish from the water moving through. I'm going to guess that it makes about 1/3 the noise of my Dolphin 2700. From looking at the flow vs. the pump that I had running I'd guess that the advertised 710 gal hr at 6" is a little optimistic, but pretty close. Maybe 650-680. It says the max. head is 4.8m and the capacity is 52 l/min so that works out to about 15' and 13.75 gal/min or 825 gal/hour. The skimmer needs 600-800 so I should be good to go for my application. It has a good strong output and that's after it was necked down from 1" to 1/2" to handle the venturi. For my application, it's a little overkill. I'll have to watch how it breaks in and am concerned about it's life expectancy, but all in all for $80 after tax for a reasonably quiet external pump it's a lot of bang for the buck. If anyone is interested here is the sellers web page
www.aquacave.com He is 20 minutes from me so I picked mine up directly from him. He sells the pumps on ebay for a little less than his site price.
I'm rating this a 7 just because it's an off brand and I'm still a little paranoid that it will die and early death. I have nothing to base that on. Also, it just has 1" barb fittings, which was just fine for me, but does limit it's applications. Other than that, it is a lot of pump for the buck.
Bruce
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MD 40 External Pump 
