[MBCook]

> Experts have warned axolotls should never be bought on impulse as they can "very challenging" to look after.

> This is because they have the same environmental, dietary and behavioural needs in captivity as they do in the wild.

I thought this was just odd. Don’t most animals that aren’t heavily domesticated like that? I mean that’s true of most all pet fish, for example.

[JaggedNZ]

Unfortunately, the whole Minecraft thing caused a lot of people to buy them with little understanding of proper care, so I suspect there's some "that's cool but please don't rush in unprepared" in the hard to keep message. There are also some misconceptions around water quality requirements, they really don't like chemical pollutants, but I have no issues with local municipal water, other areas could have issues and require RO water, etc. but there are plenty of tropical fish keepers in this same situation.

And then there's the water temp thing, that caught me off-guard and I was using frozen water bottles for a few weeks until my chiller arrived, if the tank had been located in a different part of the house it might have been required.

[macintux]

From another comment here: "you need to be able to keep the water below 24 Deg C, this means spending some money on chillers even in sub-tropical countries"

I think people anticipate needing heaters for certain types of fish, but I'd never have expected to buy a cooling unit for aquatic life.

[quickthrowman]

Yeah, adding in a chiller makes things way more complicated than just adding a resistive heater. A decent looking chiller for an aquarium is ~$1,000, plus you need temp sensors and control wiring to maintain the setpoint properly, and then you need to pray the electricity doesn’t go out. A 1/3rd HP chiller draws around 1kW including the circ pump

[fragmede]

An aquarium backup battery for a simple pump is like $50 for something that'll last a few hours of outage, but for a chiller with that kind of draw, it's a bit more expensive.

[quickthrowman]

Yeah, you’d need a 1500 VA UPS to back it up, plus a decent amount of batteries (I don’t know the math on those, someone else figures that part out for me haha)

Aquarium circ pumps can probably be powered directly by 12VDC? That would make sense if it’s only $50 for battery backup.