How I use Home Assistant to automate and monitor my aquariums

I feel the aquarium hobby is a retro hobby. Sure, the lights and filters have got much more expensive, and now rimless tanks are popular online, but the standard size tanks like the 40 breeder and the 75 gallon are the same footprint from decades past. What can I automate? Can I improve monitoring and alerting? There are some off-the-shelf options like Neptune Systems Apex, but what could a person do with Home Assistant? That's what I'm trying to figure out. Hardware Lighting Feeding Heaters Leak detection Alerts Conclusion Hardware # My home automation platform of choice is Home Assistant. This runs bare metal on a little mini PC NUC with the following specs: System76 Meerkat (Intel NUC10i3FNB board) Intel Core i3-10110U @ 2.10GHz, 4 threads 16 GB RAM 228 GB disk Home Assistant OS Zigbee: ZBT-2 and ZHA Z-Wave: ZWA-2 and Z-Wave JS To enable all the automations I'm writing about here, each aquarium gets these smart devices. When relevant, I will call out the specific bit of aquarium…