Having an aquarium teeming with fish is awesome. Keeping up with the regular maintenance of a fish tank to ensure it stays clean, on the other hand, is a whole other matter entirely. The Avo Self-Cleaning Aquarium changes that.
A hassle-free tank for tropical fish, it removes much of the work that regularly come as part of keeping an aquarium. Weekly water changes? No more. Changing the filter? Forget about changing it, you don’t even need to clean it. Scraping muck off the walls of the tank? Bye to that.
How? Avo uses a filtration system that includes a continually-moving bed that recycles older bacteria into plant food, removing harmful ammonia, nitrite and nitrate without any intervention on your part. Yes, keeping plants, which can be placed in their own designated pots around the filter system, inside the tank is required for the self-cleaning process to work, although you can opt to remove them (in which case, you’ll need partial water replacement every one to two weeks to cut down on the nitrate build up). Sure, this isn’t exactly groundbreaking (nano-aquariums that use the technique have been done before), but the Avo really seems like a nice execution all the same.
It comes with automatic LED lighting, which is carefully chosen to both keep the plants healthy and prevent algae growth. More than the utilitarian function, though, the LEDs also serve a decorative function, giving the aquarium soft red light in the morning, daylight white in the day, and cool blue in the evening.
Since this is designed for tropical fish, the aquarium automatically maintains a temperature of 27°C, which is ideal for most tropical specimens. The heating elements, by the way, are set up to create convection currents that help deliver nutrients to the roots of the plants at the bottom.
Only one size of the Avo is available (a 3.5-gallon desktop tank), which is currently on preorder at Kickstarter. Pledges to reserve a unit starts at £175.