TankMend exists because aquarium equipment advice is mostly written by people who have never opened the equipment.
Search for why a canister filter lost flow and you will find a dozen pages listing the same five causes in the same order, none of them telling you which one is actually likely, what the part costs, or how to tell the difference in under ten minutes. That gap is the whole reason this site is here.
What we cover
Six areas, chosen because they are where tanks actually fail: filtration, heating, lighting, CO2 systems, water movement, and the repairs that cut across all of them.
We do not cover fishkeeping generally. There is no stocking advice here, no breeding guides, no aquascaping tutorials. Plenty of sites do that well. This one stays on the hardware.
How the guides get written
Every guide starts from a fault or a decision, not a keyword. Usually it is something that came across the bench, or a question asked often enough that the existing answers online were clearly not good enough.
The writing then has to clear a specific bar. It needs real figures: wattage per litre, turnover rates, bubble counts, PAR at substrate depth, part prices. It needs at least one worked example with a specific tank and a specific outcome. And it has to say what to do when the fix does not work, because that is the moment most articles abandon you.
Where a repair is not worth doing, the guide says so. A twelve dollar impeller is worth swapping. A failed control board on a six year old unit usually is not, and pretending otherwise wastes your money.
What we will not do
- No sponsored placements. Nobody pays to appear in a recommendation.
- No manufactured urgency, no “you must buy this today” framing.
- No specifications invented to fill a table. Where a figure varies by setup, the range is given and the reason explained.
- No affiliate link stuffed into every paragraph. See the affiliate disclosure for exactly how this site is funded.
Who writes it
Nora Redfern runs TankMend. Twelve years servicing aquarium equipment, first in a shop workroom and now at a private bench, which means a steady supply of dead canister filters, drifting heaters, and pumps that were rattling for months before anyone noticed.
Four tanks at home, including a heavily planted 240 litre setup that has taught more about CO2 regulator behaviour than any manual. Most of what appears on this site started as a repair that had to be worked out the hard way.
Full credentials and every published guide are on the author page.
Corrections
Equipment changes, models get discontinued, and sometimes we simply get something wrong. Guides carry a publish date and are revised when that happens.
If you spot an error, tell us. Corrections are made quickly and noted on the page. Our editorial policy sets out how sourcing, review, and corrections work in detail.
Getting in touch
Questions about a specific fault, corrections, or anything else: the contact page reaches us directly, or write to [email protected]. Most messages get a reply within two business days.