InterZoo 2016 was a huge event for new aquarium products, and we could have easily spent an additional week walking the halls, checking out all the new gear, and telling you all about it. This year more than ever saw some significant improvements and innovations to every piece of reef gear that we hold dear.
Some products such as the Aqamai KPS controllable pump and Direct Current SDC Syncra and PSK pumps are innovations that we could have expected from these major companies, and both Hydor and Sicce executed beautifully on these. But right there with them, Rossmont also raised the bar for controllable pumps with their Mover and Waver, and the AquaBee Wavemaker is a very interesting new take on how to get water moving too.
Sicce gets another nod on this list by manufacturing the Seachem Tidal power filter, perhaps one of the most refined new designs on the traditional filter system this decade. And who could have foreseen the magnetically levitated Stream 3 pump from Tunze? All in all there was a lot of action in the water pump segment but other categories saw some huge innovations as well.
For devices that fall mostly under aquarium accessories, Ultra Reef and Pacific Sun both had some really cool new Reef Toys. The Ultra Reef media reactor is super cool and novel, and the fact that it can transform into an easily serviceable macroalgae reactor is just an extra feather in its cap. Last InterZoo DaStaCo definitely got our attention with their new direction for a calcium reactor, but this year it was Pacific Sun who took that idea a step further and introduced a much more practical automatic calcium reactor with more features, and fewer moving parts.
We have no idea what sort of black magic Triton used to make their Core7 supplements so much more concentrated than anything we’ve ever seen, but this is sure to give them an edge in the market since users will get more mileage from each bottle. Speaking of Magic, the Lupyled definitely brought the Walt Disney factor to LED lighting with their ‘painting with light’ feature that allows users to easily dial in the color and intensity of any one of the 1200 or so LEDs in their fixture.
This is just the cream of the crop of the new products announced at InterZoo 2016 which will make their way around the world in the coming months and year. This was by far one of the most exciting conferences for new aquarium products and we cannot wait until reefers put this next generation reef gear into use on their own home aquariums.
