The Tunze Care Booster is in an interesting category as to the best of our knowledge, it represents a rare case of a manufacturer making an accessory for an accessory. The Care Booster was released by Tunze to compliment their unique Care Magnet algae scraper design, taking advantage of a recent expiration of the floating magnetic glass cleaner patent.
In typical creative Tunze fashion, the Care Booster is not much more than a piece of molded foam material, attached to the Care Magnet using a pair of 3D printed clips. The Care Booster is of course a special kind of foam which encases the Care Magnet with both ends matching the width of the different sized scraper blades, and two identical foam pieces are provided to float the wet magnet, and improve ergonomics of the external magnet. Needless to say that the installation or upgrade to the Care Magnet is fast and simple, but how well does it work?
When we first started using the Care Booster with Tunze’s Care Magnets the we had two thoughts in mind, how would it look in the tank, and how would it affect the ‘relative strength’ of the magnet itself. At first we were really bummed that the Care Booster really added to the occupied volume of the magnet within a tank, but the dark color and non-reflective material actually blends in pretty well, it’s something that we quickly got used to.
But most importantly, while the Care Booster was designed to prevent the scraper from falling and make it much easier to retrieve, the improvement to the scraping strength is really the biggest bonus. We’ve always loved the size and scraping action of the Tunze Care Magnet but it does suffer from being hard to retrieve when it falls.
With the Tunze Care Booster the risk of the magnet falling is now gone, making it much easier and faster to clean our aquarium glass without fear of the magnets coming apart. Since we have multiple tanks – and several Care Magnets – we opted to only use the Care Booster with the internal scraping magnet, although the foam does add very good ergonomics to the external magnet as well.
At just $12.99 the Care Booster is a simple and affordable upgrade to one of our favorite algae cleaning magnets, and we were pleased to discover that it improves the glass cleaning performance more than we expected.
