About Aquarium Tech Data
Last updated: August 17, 2026
Aquarium Tech Data is a specification-first reference for the equipment that automates a tank — feeders, timers, dosers, controllers, monitors, pumps and heaters. We do not keep fish, we do not run a test tank, and we do not evaluate this equipment in use. What we do is read manufacturer specifications closely, convert them into consistent units, and publish what a whole category states about itself.
1. Why this site exists
Search for almost any piece of aquarium equipment and the results are forum threads and hobbyist blogs. That is a genuine strength of this hobby — the collective experience in those threads is real and hard-won — and it has one gap: nobody puts the numbers side by side.
How many milliliters per minute does a doser actually move. How many outlets does a controller switch, and at what wattage. What flow rate does a circulation pump produce for what power draw. These are published figures, they are comparable, and they are scattered across a thousand product pages in inconsistent units. Collecting them is the one useful thing a site like this can do that a forum thread cannot.
2. What we deliberately do not do
- We do not test. No tank, no probes, no long-run reliability data. Nothing here is a performance finding.
- We do not publish star ratings, review counts or prices. None are specifications, and a price written into a page is stale before it is indexed.
- We do not rank products or name winners. Comparison pages publish distributions so you can place a product against its category. A leaderboard sorts for extreme values, and in retail specification data the extreme values are frequently errors.
- We make no claim about what will happen in your tank. This is the hard limit, and it has its own section.
3. The limit that matters most: livestock
Everything else on this site is a specification question. This one is not.
The equipment covered here sits between your livestock and a set of conditions that will kill them. A heater controller that fails closed cooks a tank. A doser that over-delivers alkalinity can wipe out a reef in hours. A feeder that empties its whole chamber while you are away fouls the water. These are not hypothetical failure modes; they are the reason this equipment exists.
No page on this site will tell you that a piece of equipment will keep anything alive. A specification describes what a device is built to do under conditions the manufacturer chose. It does not describe what it does when a probe drifts, a relay welds shut or the power comes back after an outage. We publish the numbers and we do not extend them into outcomes we have no basis to promise.
Where the physics of a failure mode is well understood we will explain it, because understanding how a device fails is part of choosing one. Where a question is about your specific tank, your stock or your water chemistry, the answer is not on this site and we will say so rather than guess.
The practical consequence, which you will see repeated on the equipment pages: redundancy beats specification. A second independent thermostat protects a tank in a way that no single controller’s spec sheet can, however good the spec sheet is.
4. How pages are built and maintained
Specifications are collected from retail listings across each category, normalised into consistent units, then put through two checks — whether a field is published widely enough across the category to describe it, and whether the unit in the source text is one the field can legitimately hold. Fields that fail either check are removed and their absence is stated. The detail is on review methodology.
If a category turns out not to publish enough structured data to support a comparison, the finding goes on the category page and no comparison page is written.
5. Who writes this
Pages are edited by Devon Ashby, a pen name, disclosed as one here rather than presented as a person you could look up. It exists to give the site a consistent point of accountability, not to imply reefkeeping experience.
There is no aquarium expertise being claimed. The site states on every page that it does not test equipment and keeps no livestock, and a byline suggesting years at the glass would contradict that everywhere else. What the byline is accountable for is method: whether every figure traces to a source, whether limits are stated, and whether errors get corrected.
6. How the site is funded
Aquarium Tech Data earns retailer commission on qualifying purchases made through links on this site, at no additional cost to you. There are no rankings for a commission to influence and no manufacturer relationships of any kind. Full terms are on the affiliate disclosure.
7. Corrections
Specification errors are the most likely kind of error here and we would rather hear about them than not. Write to editorial@aquariumtechdata.com with the page and the product named, and we will check it against the source. Corrections are made in place with the last-updated date changed.
Common questions
Are you affiliated with any aquarium equipment manufacturer?
No. No sponsorships, no paid placements, no supplied product, no pre-publication review by anyone outside the site. The only revenue is retailer commission, disclosed above.
Why write about equipment you have never run?
Because the specific thing missing from this hobby’s coverage is the cross-product comparison, and that is built from published figures rather than from experience. Experience is what the forums have in abundance; consistent numbers are what they do not.
Will you tell me what equipment my tank needs?
No. That depends on your volume, stock, water chemistry and how long you leave the tank unattended — none of which we can see. We can show you what a category publishes so you can match it against requirements you already know.
How current are the specifications?
Each page carries the date its figures were collected. Manufacturers revise specifications without notice, so check anything decision-critical against the manufacturer’s own page before buying.