hello and welcome to Dolbec aqua designs in today's video i will be doing
a review of the fluval flex 15 gallon aquarium
i've had this aquarium for more than a year so i had plenty of time to test out all of its features
to build a proper opinion on this aquarium and so today in this video i'll be doing a quick
overview of the features of this aquarium i will also be doing some recommendations on
what type of stocking you should put in your aquarium i'll be going over what i think are
the pros and cons of this aquarium and lastly i will draw my conclusion of if this aquarium is
worth it or not and hopefully this whole video will help you decide whether or not you should
buy a full flex 15 gallon so first of all what do you get in the box when you buy the aquarium
well you will get a lid and in the lid there's going to be an integrated light
which you can control with a remote you will also get the full glass aquarium
you will also get a foam mat that they called a self leveling mat and for the filtration you
will get a submersible pump that goes into the back section and for the filtration unit you
will also get a big sponge as well as a pack of bio media and activated carbon you will also get
a nozzle that goes into the aquarium that allows you to direct the flow that comes from the pump
so realistically when you buy this aquarium you got everything you need i might add that you
could buy a heater if the fish that you want to put in this aquarium needs heated water
and a nice thing that you could also buy for the aquarium hardware wise is a light timer to help
you control the light cycle so you don't have to manually turn on and off the lights every time
for the more official stats of this aquarium meaning height length and width i will put them
in the video description if you need them so this aquarium is a 15 gallon aquarium
but you have to take in note that this is not 15 gallon of swimmable space for your fish
because this aquarium uses an integrated sump in the back to do the filtration so you're
going to be losing some volume in the back for the filtration unit since this aquarium is relatively
small and there's not a lot of water in it you can put it on relatively any type of aquarium
stand be it a just regular piece of furniture or there's also a official stand for this aquarium
if you're looking for more information on this official aquarium stand i've also got a video
on it and you can click on the description another feature of the flex is that there's a honeycomb
pattern that is printed on the top layer of the aquarium the usefulness of this honeycomb pattern
is to hide the water line the honeycomb pattern is also present on the back sections and help
hide out the filtration section meaning that you can have this aquarium in the middle of the room
but you won't see the filtration units and it won't distract from the main aquarium
my main recommendation for fish that you can put in this aquarium is actually to have a small
colony of shrimp and put a nerite snail and a small school of tiny fish the reason why i'm
recommending tiny fish is because they will not attack the tiny shrimp and i highly recommend that
you have shrimp because shrimp will help you clean up a bit the substrate by scavenging for food and
they're super interesting to watch so what are the positive sides of this aquarium this aquarium
is an all-in-one kit meaning that if you go to the fish store and you buy the aquarium you got
pretty much everything you need the only things that you're going to need afterwards is substrate
for your plants your decorations and the actual fish that you're going to put in the aquarium
the filtration unit is something that you can reuse so it's not like these other filters where
you have to buy cartridges each month to change this filtration unit i've been running it for a
whole year and the only thing that i do is that once in a while i clean up the filtration unit
just to make sure that everything stays clean if you want to have more information on how i do the
maintenance on the this type of aquarium i made a full video that's dedicated on that question
there's also plenty of space in the back section to put a heater and so you won't see any equipment
in this aquarium at all and this is something that i really enjoy that's also something that
my family enjoys because we don't see anything that distracts us from the plants or the fish
and that's really something that i find is neat speaking of filtration this is one of the first
aquariums that i've seen that is super quiet some people on the internet tend to say otherwise for
some reason their pumps are doing a lot of sound honestly i just think that you gotta properly
place the pump in the back section so that it doesn't touches the wall and so it doesn't transfer
vibration because for me these aquariums are the most silent aquariums that i've seen
in my entire life the light that comes with the aquarium is strong enough to grow plants as
you can see these are all the plants are growing in my aquarium and this is just the regular light
that comes with the aquarium another thing that's undeniable about this aquarium is the unique look
that it has honestly there's not a single aquarium on the market that has the exact same look with
the flex that's on this side versus more of a bow front aquarium so you're pretty much guaranteed
that anyone that's going to walk into your home and see your aquarium is going to be amazed at the
format so what about the more negative things that i have to say about this aquarium well there's not
a whole lot of it the first thing that i find is a bit misleading is how it's marketed it's marketed
as a 15 gallon aquarium it is there's 15 gallon of water in this aquarium but there's not 15 gallon
of swimmable space for the fish and so you have to keep this in mind when you're thinking about which
fish you want to put in your aquarium because it's less than 15 gallons another thing that i
find a bit gimmicky is the light you'll see that the light you can put different modes that are
really fancy such as storm that i'm honestly not sure if anyone really has to use them
you're gonna cause fish epilepsy with the with this feature you can also put fully blue green
whatever color which i find it's not super useful i just keep it to white light with a bit of red in
it it's one of those features that i'm not really sure why it's with the aquarium it's not needed at
least another thing that i don't really like is the water inlets for the filtration unit as you're
gonna see in the b-roll that i'm gonna shoot is that there are two sections one at the bottom and
one at the top where there's holes and where the water is sucked in to enter the filtration unit
and these holes can be a bit big so if you have baby fish baby shrimp
they are gonna be able to enter and get in the back section in the filtration unit and
they're gonna get stuck there so that's kind of a problem the newest versions of the aquarium all
come with filter guards that you can put they are definitely helpful to stop stuff from getting into
the back section so in my opinion the fluid flex 15 gallon is an aquarium that i highly recommend
both beginner fish keepers and more advanced fish keepers will find something that they like in this
particular aquarium and i was super happy with the results i had no complaint to do about filtration
the light for me this whole aquarium worked really well i find it also to be affordable because
you're gonna get a rimless aquarium that comes with a lid with a light with the self leveling
mat you're also going to get the integrated filtration all for a quite reasonable price
and so that's all for my thoughts on the fluval flex 15 gallon if you have
any questions about it just post them in the comments section usually i answer quite fast
thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one
you