What a first aquarium really costs

If you take one thing from this page: no starter kit includes a way to measure ammonia, and ammonia is what kills fish in new tanks. This is a mandatory line item, not an upgrade.

It is also, per test, the cheapest thing on the list. Over 800 tests in one box works out at a tiny fraction of a cent per reading, and you will use perhaps two hundred of them in your first year. Judged that way it is the best value purchase in the hobby, which is the opposite of how it feels standing in the shop looking at the price on the box.

The honest downsides are real. Liquid reagents are slower and fiddlier than strips, the nitrate test needs the second bottle shaken hard and then a wait, and the color card is genuinely hard to read between adjacent shades under warm room lighting. It does not test hardness, chlorine or alkalinity.

Reagents do not last forever either. Treat a replacement kit as a cost that recurs every few years rather than a one-time purchase.

Every water change needs the replacement water conditioned, and you do a water change every week, forever. That makes dechlorinator the definitive recurring cost of fishkeeping, and it is the one the kit disguises by including a sample sachet.

Concentration is what decides the real cost here rather than the sticker. A concentrated conditioner treats far more water per bottle than a dilute one, so comparing bottle prices without comparing dose rates tells you nothing. Read the dosage on the back and work out how many water changes the bottle covers.

What Prime does not do, and this causes genuine confusion: it does not remove ammonia. Seachem states it detoxifies ammonia, nitrite and nitrate, binding them into a less harmful form for up to 48 hours, and your test kit will still read the ammonia afterwards. A reading that has not dropped after dosing is not a broken test kit.

Buy the smallest bottle that covers a few months. Conditioner does not improve with age and a giant bottle sized for a pond is a false economy on a 10 gallon tank.

Filtration is where the running costs quietly diverge. A cartridge filter asks you to buy a cartridge every few weeks forever. A sponge filter asks you to rinse a sponge in old tank water and put it back, which costs nothing at all.

Over a couple of years that difference is one of the largest single line items in this entire guide, and almost nobody accounts for it when comparing filters in the shop. The cheaper filter on the shelf is frequently the more expensive filter to own.

Be honest about what it needs before treating it as the budget option, though. An air pump, airline tubing and a check valve are usually all sold separately, so price the whole set. Without a check valve, a power cut can siphon tank water back down the airline and onto the floor.

It has no chemical stage, and it sits visibly in the tank rather than hiding behind it. That is the trade.

A heater dial is a setting. A thermometer is a reading. They disagree more often than beginners expect, and the failure that matters is a heater which believes it is holding 78 degrees Fahrenheit while the tank sits several degrees off.

This is a genuinely small purchase that protects the most expensive livestock decision you will make, so it belongs in the mandatory column rather than the nice-to-have one.

Avoid making the stick-on strip that came with your kit your only thermometer. Mounted outside the glass, it reads the glass rather than the water, and a cold room or a sunny window pulls it away from the truth.

This is the skip entry and it belongs on a costs page specifically, because it is the purchase people make to save money and it is where saving money costs the most.

Tetra's EasyStrips 6-in-1 tests nitrate, nitrite, water hardness, chlorine, alkalinity and pH. Ammonia is not among them. That is Tetra's own parameter list, not our inference. A beginner buys the cheaper test to watch a cycle and cannot see the one compound doing the damage.

There is a version of this purchase that is fine: strips as a fast weekly recheck on an already-cycled tank, bought in addition to a liquid ammonia test. Bought instead of one, on a new tank, they are worse than nothing because they produce confidence without information.

Per test they are also not especially cheap. The strip tub holds far fewer tests than the liquid kit, so the saving is on the shelf price rather than on the cost of actually testing.