An eye-catching aquarium filled with elegant and colourful tropical fish can be a beautiful addition to any home or place of business, but it can also be a surprisingly expensive one, and all that effort and expense will be for nothing if your aquarium leaks, cracks or shatters. Consequently, many tropical fish keepers are moving away from traditional tanks and aquariums made of glass, and opting instead for more modern aquariums made from Perspex.

This unique glass substitute is made from tough acrylic plastics, and its unique properties make it ideal for aquarium building. Choosing a Perspex tank for your tropical fish can have a number of advantages over choosing a more conventional glass tank:

Durable

Perspex aquariums are incredibly durable, and can sustain the weight of thousands of gallons of water without cracking or leaking, making Perspex an ideal material for larger tanks (especially if you have your aquarium built into a wall or room divider). Perspex is also much less brittle than glass, and tends to flex rather than shatter under impact damage; this makes them far better at resisting accidental knocks and scrapes, and is a particularly useful qualities for aquariums located in public areas such as office lobbies.

Lightweight

A Perspex aquarium will be far lighter than a glass aquarium of equivalent size, making it much easier to transport and install. This is especially if you intend to install your aquarium in a building's upper storeys, and also reduces the expense of transporting large, custom-built tanks to your home or business premises.

Easier to repair

If a glass aquarium cracks, the damage can be very difficult to repair in a way that maintains the tank's watertight seal, and you will most probably have to replace the tank entirely. Perspex tanks, while much less liable to suffer damage, are more easily repaired if they do take a significant beating; individual sheets of Perspex can be replaced without going to the expense of replacing the entire tank, and smaller cracks can be repaired with fillers and heat treatments that leave very little trace of the original damage.

Infinitely customisable

Glass aquariums come in a very limited range of shapes and styles, and are hardly the most distinctive enclosures for your tropical fish. The versatility of Perspex forming processes, on the other hand, allows perspex aquariums to be made in a near-limitless array of shapes, sizes and designs. Tall, slender Perspex aquarium tubes are a particularly popular choice in commercial settings, as they have large internal capacities capable of sustaining many fish while taking up very little floor space.

Easier to clean

One of the most challenging aspects of keeping tropical fish is keeping their aquariums clean, as the warm water they are kept in is a haven for algal growth. Perspex aquariums make removing this algae much easier, as they can withstand harsher cleaning chemicals and are much less likely to become scratched while you scrub away at stubborn algal blooms.