When I started in the aquarium hobby, I didn’t know anyone using an ATO of any kind. Soon the Tunze Osmolator came out, and I thought of it as some unrealistic luxury item that was ridiculously expensive. At the time, it was over $150, which is well over $200 in today's dollars. We are now at a point where I haven’t set up a single tank without an ATO in years. The ATO makes it much easier to leave the tank for a few days or to ensure the water level doesn’t drop ridiculously low between cleanings. The IceCap ATO has a price of just $109.71 (8/25/26). Any aquarist will benefit from an ATO, and now, for less than $110, you can get one with 3 electronic sensors, a pump, tubing, and a magnetic sensor mount.

The first dosing pumps I remember were the ones from Two Little Fishies that you controlled by using a small eyeglass screwdriver to turn a speed control knob. You had to plug the unit in, let the pump fill a beaker for one minute, and then do the math to figure out how much it would add if you ran it all day. Then you used the screwdriver to adjust the speed until you got your dosage right. These were nearly $200 dosing pumps. I then remember the SpectraPure Liter Meter that gave you a single-head, completely controllable dosing pump for only $250, and each additional head was only about $120 more. Needless to say, if you had a dosing pump, you were one of those fancy reef keepers living in luxury. The Simplicity 4 Channel Dosing Pump is a fully programmable dosing pump with 4 dosing channels. This will easily meet all the dosing needs of most reef keepers, and it is only $149.95 (8/25/26).

I put off buying an aquarium controller for many years. I always thought they were cool but never thought I really needed one. I then had an incident with my home tank where the GFCI tripped for some reason, my pumps lost power, and all of my fish suffocated from lack of oxygen. I lost at least $700 in fish overnight. What was worse was that I was in the house and didn’t walk into the room. If I had just known that the tank was without power, I could have reset the GFCI and saved the fish. After this event, I bought my first aquarium controller for nearly $600. 10 years ago, I was willing to spend $600 to get power outage notifications sent to my phone. Still, you can now buy a Hydros Start for just $346.49 (8/25/26), which includes temperature and power-outage notifications and four programmable outlets for any standard plug-in unit in your system. It also has ports for water-level and leak sensors that could have saved me a lot of time mopping up after floods. These entry-level controllers are easy to use, making them more accessible to the average aquarist. Adding a controller to your tank so you can monitor its activity, sensor levels, or other emergencies will give you extra peace of mind for your floors and wallet.