About Glass & Gravel
One enthusiast, a lot of manufacturer documentation, and the arithmetic that comes out of it. No test bench, and we say so on every page.
What this site is
Glass & Gravel is about betta and nano tanks - the desk-scale freshwater aquarium, done properly. 41 pages across six subjects: tanks, heaters, filters, stocking, plants and care.
The reason it exists is narrow and specific. Almost every question a nano keeper has is really an arithmetic question - what wattage, how much flow, how many gallons, what dose - and almost nobody publishes the arithmetic. You get a rule of thumb with the room temperature silently assumed, or a range spanning a factor of four, or a species list with no volume attached to it.
So this site publishes the sums. All of them, with the assumptions named, so you can disagree with the assumption and redo the working rather than taking our word for anything.
Who writes it
Scooter M., enthusiast.
I'm an enthusiast who's genuinely into this. I read the manuals, compile the published specifications, and do the arithmetic. No lab coat, no test bench, no shelf of free samples. When I tell you a 5-gallon tank needs about 25 watts to hold 78 degrees in a 72-degree room, I'll show you the heat-loss sum I did and the manufacturer page the wattage came from, so you can check both.
That is the whole biography, and the things it does not say are deliberate. There is no aquarium qualification here, no years-in-the-hobby claim, no veterinary training, and no test lab. Anybody in this category can write those sentences and almost nobody can be held to them, so we do not write them.
What we will not claim
- That we tested anything. Units we claim to have tested: zero. Everyone in this category says they tested twenty tanks. We have not tested any, and we say so.
- A credential we do not hold.
- Tenure. No “twenty years in the hobby”.
- A number we cannot source or compute. Where a manufacturer publishes nothing, the specification table says so.
The full method is here, including the arithmetic and where each constant came from.
What we do instead
Read the manufacturer documentation for 20 products and cite it. Record what each maker declines to publish - which in this category is a great deal, and is itself worth knowing. Then compute what those figures imply for a tank of your size in a room of your temperature, and print the sum on the page.
The heater wattage on this site is derived from Fluval’s own published ratings rather than from folklore. The dosing comes from Seachem’s published directions converted to nano volumes. The turnover figures come from your tank’s real water volume rather than its shelf label. None of that requires a lab, and all of it is checkable.
The things we say that cost us money
A site funded by affiliate commission has an obvious incentive to recommend purchases. Ours are the following, and we mean them:
- A betta needs no tank mates at all. Tank mates are something you want, not something the fish needs.
- The cheapest correct filter is usually a sponge filter driven by an air pump, which is one of the least expensive objects in the hobby.
- A plain ten-gallon tank beats a designer five-gallon kit for a betta, every time, at a lower total cost.
- Feed less. The most common husbandry error costs nothing to fix.
- We do not link to livestock, and would not even if Amazon sold it.
How it is funded
Affiliate commission from Amazon, and nothing else. No sponsored placement, no paid review, no free product. A commission never moves a ranking. The full disclosure, and the editorial policy that governs what appears here.
Glass & Gravel is published by Slate Mill Group.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, we want to know. info@glassandgravel.com, or the contact form. Point at the page and the number; we will check the source and fix it with a dated note rather than editing silently.