Why I Built a Tank That Runs Itself

August 21, 2026

I spend most of my day on video calls. I’m a systems engineer, I work from home in Winnipeg, and on any given Tuesday I’m on camera for four or five hours. For two years the thing behind my head was a blank beige wall and a slightly crooked bookshelf. Not exactly a view.

So I started looking for something alive to put back there. A plant, maybe. A print. Then one night I watched a planted aquarium on a channel — the light coming up through the leaves, a few small fish drifting around — and that was it. That’s the backdrop I wanted. Something that moves. Something that’s quietly doing its own thing while I talk about deployment pipelines.

Here’s where my brain went sideways, though. I don’t just look at a fish tank and see fish. I see a system. Inputs, outputs, things that can fail. And the first question a systems guy asks about anything new is: what happens when I’m not here?

Because I’m not here a lot.

I add it up honestly and it’s about three trips a year, two weeks each. Some of that is work — conferences, a client site, a stretch at head office. Some of it is the good kind: Sarah and I take Leo somewhere warm to escape the worst of a Manitoba January. Either way, the total is roughly six weeks a year where nobody is home to sprinkle fish food and top off the water.

Now stack that against how most people keep an aquarium. Feed it every day. Watch the water. Do a water change every weekend. Wipe the glass. It’s a small daily chore, and for a lot of folks that chore is the fun part. Good for them. But a daily chore and a guy who vanishes for two weeks at a time is a bad match. That’s not a hobby, that’s a countdown to coming home to a green, cloudy tank and a very bad smell.

I know because I almost quit before I started. I read enough horror stories — the auto-feeder that dumped a week of food in one day, the heater that stuck on and cooked everything, the water that evaporated so low the filter started sucking air. Every one of those stories ended the same way: someone came home to a disaster. A lot of people, after that, just give up and the tank goes to the basement.

I didn’t want to give up the backdrop. So I flipped the whole project around.

Instead of “how do I keep a fish tank,” I asked “how do I build one that stays healthy for two weeks with nobody touching it.” That one change fixed everything. It’s not a pet you visit every day. It’s a small, stable ecosystem with a few fail-safes bolted on, and the goal is boring on purpose: I leave, I come back, and it looks exactly the same.

Turns out that’s very doable. Not with expensive gear — with the right gear and a little bit of testing before you fly out. A big enough water volume so the chemistry moves slowly. A filter with enough good bacteria to handle the waste on its own. Plants that eat the stuff that causes algae. A lid that stops the water from evaporating away. A feeder you actually trust because you watched it work for a week while you were still home. Timers instead of memory.

That’s the whole idea behind this site. I’m not going to gatekeep, and I’m not going to tell you that you need an $800 pressurized rig to keep a plant alive — you don’t. What I am going to do is treat your tank the way I’d treat any system that has to run unattended: figure out what fails, and design the failure out before it can happen.

The funny part? The tank behind me on calls has become the most-complimented thing in my whole setup. People stop mid-meeting to ask about it. And the honest answer is that the best-looking aquarium I’ve ever owned is also the one I fuss over the least, because I built it to not need me.

That’s the promise I’m chasing here, post by post. A tank nice enough to show off. Stable enough to leave. If that sounds like the kind of thing you’ve been scared to try because you travel too much — good. You’re exactly who I’m writing this for.