Yes the tube continues blowing air, which rise and create some amount of bubbles, but it depends if you want larger or smaller bubbles, or how many of them.

As a side note, I also made some holes in a small water bottle (such as 16 Fl oz). I made a hole for the tubing, and now the tube blows holes into the water bottle, which then escape the bottle in all the little holes, and come out with more bubbles. Still not as fine as using an air stone but it did create more bubbles than just putting in the tube by itself.

I am up to 8 separate buckets now and decided not to spend money on air stones for all of them, i put 'T' fittings on the end of the tubing. This was a new change for this week so i will let you know how it works out, but if you look at all of the MJ forums, most people say air stones dont really provide any benefit.

Copied this from another thread I posted in:

The reason for the water pump in the tote is simple. It's going to aerate better than air stones. I use pumps in some of my fish tanks for the same reason. You don't needbubbles to aerate. Just movement and some agitation. The big thing is the amount of water you can displace. You'll know how much air I pump into my stones in my buckets. It's excessive by most people's standards. But the entire surface of that water is getting churned and it's creating water flow from bottom to top the back to the bottom. With the large footprint of something like a tote a single water pump can displace all the water about multiple times in an hour. With mine it's about 7 times. The more water that get forced to the top the more oxygen it can pick up. Multiple air stones in that tote still can't displace nearly that amount of water. In my buckets when there is usually only about 3-4 gallons air stones can get the job done since there is less volume and there is a small footprint and the coverage of the agitation covers the diameter of the bucket.

Point being it's not just about bubbles. Bubbles passing through the water do add some DO but it's more about water movement and agitation created by the air stones and displacing water multiple times.

My house is on the market and we're hoping to move soon. I want to redesign my whole system then, possibly recirculating but not sure.

What are the specs on your water pump?

That pump is small (60-80 gal/hr) and only for aerating the tote. You'd need a bigger pump for recirculating. If you do a recirculating system you have to plan out your plants, type and timing, since they all share the same solution and generally won't have the same requirements or just accept some will get a little more or less of what they need. One solution if you have that issue is to foliar feed to supplement certain plants when needed.