Is an Acrylic Tank The Right Choice For Your Home
When a person or family decides they want an aquarium they are suddenly and often unexpectedly hit with a series of options they know little about and likely never would have expected to come from such a decision, after all the life inside is supposed to be the complicated part not the aquarium itself. You could just buy the first aquarium you see but you very well might be setting yourself up for disappointment, regret or even the outright need to venture back to the store to pick up something different very soon.
One of the most major decisions to make is what type of tank to purchase. There are two primary materials that tanks are made out of; glass or acrylic. What are the real differences between the two, does it really matter? Depending on what you want to use it for it might not really matter that much more than simple preference but the best route to go is always to know the advantages and disadvantages of each.
There are overall several different factors to consider, but to many who might not take their decision as seriously the only real consideration is price. In most cases glass is a bit cheaper, this difference in price however decreases as the tank size in question increases. As the tank gets larger the necessary thickness of glass over the necessary thickness of acrylic starts to even out and eventually glass prices will even become more expensive once this point is reached the existence of glass aquariums in these great sizes is almost zero. So if you intend to have an extremely large aquarium acrylic is almost always the way to go.
There are several reasons you might want to go with an acrylic aquarium even if you intend to purchase a typical or small size aquarium, and by typical or small size I am mostly referring to sizes of less than a hundred gallons or so. Acrylic is considerably lighter to lift, it weighs approximately fourty percent that of glass aquariums of the same size, while in the smaller aquariums this is less important it is not meaningless altogether as they will still have to be moved sometimes. A great advantage of acrylic is that it is a lot stronger than glass, this contrary to weight is much more important for the smaller aquariums where a nicely thrown ball or dog toy could leave you with an unbelievable mess of fifty gallons of water in your living room, wear as larger glass tanks might not be as strong as acrylic, they are still thick enough to handle any normal home accident.
The view you get of the life within the fish tank is in general better with acrylic, they are less reflective than glass if you intend to place the tank across from a bright light or window this reflectivity could become a great nuisance. Acrylic also gives overall better view ability than typical glass, meaning that it has closer to zero distortion when looking though it. There is special glass available however that has even better view ability than acrylic but it is considerably more expensive.
One final difference that might be important is scratching. Acrylic is much easier to scratch both inside from the livestock or moving gravel, as well as on the outside from the dogs front paws or backing a chair into it. But even though glass is much harder to put visible scratches in, it unlike acrylic it is almost impossible to buff out or fix a scratch in the glass, if it gets scratched it is scratched for life.
