Yes sir, you hit the nail on the head. A "regular" air compressor, like the kind used in business or construction, has a large air tank. As the tank pressure drops to a certain point the compressor kicks on.
My particular 2 cylinder compressor can fully recover at the bubbler bleed off rate I'm currently using in 1 minute.
In my case I ran it for 3 days at 24 hours. The foul pond water smell was nearly gone. A bunch of the water meal and duck weed was churned around and seemed to stop growing too. I have now put a Walmart timer on the compressor so it runs for about 3 hours in the evening and 3 hours early in the morning. During that 3 hours it will kick on for ONE minute every 30 minutes. Total run time for the actual compressor is 12 minutes now.
