Aqueon Evolve 8 - pros/cons?

You are forgetting the point. Drilling the holes actually interferes with the correct function of the cartridge. You can't have both. It's one or the other and we want people to use the cartridge.

Acrylic is pretty much acrylic. There will be scratches. As a former diver at the National Aquarium in Baltimore my duties were cleaning those panels. They are only cleaned with soft cloths which works well if you clean the tanks daily as they do in commercial displays. The thicker the material the less you are going to see the small scratches too.

Although acrylic is a softer material that does scratch more easily it can also have those scratches polished out which is something that can't be done with glass.

Larger tanks are always nicer but they come with greater cost. Now instead of a kit coming in around $125 you have a kit coming in around $200 which would be too expensive to do well in the desktop market. Trust me there is a lot of research that goes into launching any product and a big part of it is to make sure it fits the right price to be able to compete.

If you are looking for something a bit larger there is always the Biocube 14 or 29.

Andy
 
Price difference going up from 2 4 8 is like $20-25 between the models with the 8's retailing for $100 and frequently $80 with 15-20% off sales from petco and petsmart. I would think that would put the msrp on a slightly bigger one at around $130ish which isn't bad at all. I'm currently looking at innovative marines 8g setup thats selling for $200. Biocubes are nice for certain things but I like the rimless look and would end up tossing the PC hood out for higher lighting.
 
I can't really go into any more detail on pricing strategy but I can tell you that we looked at doing a bigger one and it did not price out right.

LED is popular and good quality lighting but it doesn't always mean higher light output. If you compare the actual PAR values for a Biocube compared to similar size and price LED fixtures you are going to find that the PC fixtures outperform the LED's. But if you are willing to spend more you can get really good LED fixtures with high power chips and advanced control which you can't do in PC. But you are talking difference between $100 and $500 in lighting.

Andy
 
Ah figured might be additional costs i hadn't thought of in my guesstimate.

Lighting no matter who's setup I go with will likely be a kessil 150 or IM skkye 30w clamp on.
 
Kessil's are nice lights. But you are going to lose any sunrise, sunset, or moonlight ability. You may want to add in a separate blue or red LED accent light for sunrise, sunset, or moonlight lighting.

At $225 (Marine Depot) the Kessil 150 is only $65 less than the entire Biocube 29 tank with the PC lighting so you can see my point about the cost difference. You get what you pay for basically.

Andy
 
Before i make the final light decision I will also look into what I could do for a DIY fixture.

I agree many would go for the biocube but my stocking plan calls for smaller or else what I want will be hardly ever seen, plan to stock with a couple pompom crabs, trapezia crab, sexy shrimp, maxi mini anemone, and probably some sort of cryptic goby.
 
Sounds cool. I always liked the nano tanks. Biggest problem I ever had was keeping the salinity stable. You really need to keep on the evaporation. Just going a few days without topping off would cause the salinity to spike up 20-30% simply due to evaporation.

Andy
 
I've been pretty happy with mine so far, but I'm irritated that three of the LEDs are already going out. It's only a few months old.
 
Narwhal72 said:
Sounds cool. I always liked the nano tanks. Biggest problem I ever had was keeping the salinity stable. You really need to keep on the evaporation. Just going a few days without topping off would cause the salinity to spike up 20-30% simply due to evaporation.

Andy
Click to expand...

Yeah I had a 4g pico that was a pain to keep everything stable, managed to do ok on a 10g though so thats why I'm aiming for around 8g+
 
LauraL, If you have had it less than a year the light is still under warranty. If you call or contact Aqueon Customer Service they should be able to send you out a new one.

The LED's are wired 3 chips in a series and then each group of 3 is connected in parallel to the entire circuit on the PC board. When one chip in the group goes bad it will bring down the other two. The early failure rate for LED chips is about 0.01% which is about 1 in every 10000. Doesn't sound like much but when you consider that there are 30 chips in an Evolve 8 light that's one failure in every 333 lights. Doesn't happen often but it's normal to have it from time to time.

Andy
 
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