Choosing the correct Aquarium size for your home can be a challenge because each Aquarium size has its own pros and cons
Problem with big aquarium size (eg: more than 150 Liters):
+ Difficult to change the water, if you want to change said 25% to 50% of a 150 Liters (40 gallons) tank, you’ll probably need to bring or route a lot of water in and out.
+ Risky to your home. Fish tanks are often made of quality glass and glue, anyway they are still prone to water leakage and glass broken. Imagine your young son or daughter throws a ball into it or someone accidently whacks it down the floor. Well, the damage will then be beyond imagination.
+ Difficult to clean. More water volume means more glass, more substrate, more decoration, and so on. When they become dirty, imagine all the cleaning up work would take more time and effort.
+ Required more energy to run. Yes, you read that right. If you have a bigger Aquarium and you house tropical fish, you need to run a bigger heater and strong filter. They said “A medium tank (100 Liters) will run between 150 – 200 kWh per year, while a large aquarium (200 Liters) needs 200 – 400 kWh per year”, so besides the cost of buying fish food, the cost of changing water and cleaning, you have to pay for electric as well.
+ Difficult to move around. 1 liter of water is not heavy, but sure 20 liters would weigh already 20kg. Once a tank is filled with water, it’s difficult and risky if you want to move it somewhere else in the home.
But how about a small Aquarium size? do they have problems like the above? Small Aquariums like the one of less than 20 Liters have their issues, here are some:
+ It would be very difficult to maintain water stability: imagine your aquarium becomes dirty and you want to clean it and change the water, if you do it with an Aquarium of 20 Liters, you probably already vacuum out 10 or so. And that is around 50% of the volume. When you do the water change of that much, a lot of disruption happens to the Aquarium and fish will suffer from it.
+ It would be difficult to clean also, although might be easier if you can take out the fish and deco. Anyway, you will try to navigate your cleaner devices or your hand in these tiny 4 walls of glass. Try it once and you’ll see how difficult it is.
+ Difficult to add or maintain healthy fish. If your fish is breeding, you’ll soon be overpopulated. If one of the fish has disease, it will spread quickly to all other fish. And to catch one single fish in such a small Aquarium is difficult as well.
+ You don’t have much room to do any aquascaping or decoration and if you do, you don’t have much volume left for water or fish.
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