Two weeks away with a sitter calling twice a week — four visits in total — works well for a stable angelfish tank, provided the preparation happens before you leave rather than being delegated. The principle is simple: the tank should need almost nothing, the food should be impossible to overdo, and the sitter's job should be observation first and feeding second.
The Week Before: Stabilise, Do Not Experiment
Clean the filter about a week before departure, not the day before — a freshly disturbed filter and a fortnight without you is a poor combination, and a week lets you confirm everything runs normally afterwards. Do a partial water change and test the water in the last day or two so the tank starts the holiday at its best. Put the lights on a timer at the usual day length, because a sitter who forgets lights — or leaves them on — invites algae and stressed fish. Fit a line on the glass at the normal water level so the sitter can see evaporation at a glance, and leave prepared, dechlorinated top-up water with clear instructions if the level drops below it.
Do not add new fish, new plants, or new equipment in the run-up to a holiday. A quarantine problem or a faulty gadget should surface while you are home, not on day nine.
Feeding: The Sitter Cannot Be Trusted With the Tub
Overfeeding by a kind sitter is the most common holiday disaster: uneaten food fouls the water of a tank nobody is watching daily. Remove the guesswork entirely. Pre-portion each sitter-visit feed — frozen food thawed per your instructions, or a measured amount in a labelled pot, one pot per visit — and hide the main food supply so nobody improvises a second helping. If you use a timed feeder for daily staples between visits, set it up and watch it run for several days before you leave, checking that it dispenses the small amount you intend and does not dump. Angelfish are greedy and will always act hungry; write that sentence in the sitter's instructions, in capitals if necessary.
What the Four Visits Are Actually For
Give the sitter a short written routine: feed only the portion left for that visit, count every fish, look for anyone hiding, gasping at the surface, or showing white spots or torn fins, check the temperature is in its usual range, confirm the filter is running, and top up only to the marked line with the water you left. Leave a phone number where you can genuinely be reached, plus a local fish shop or aquatic vet contact for a real emergency, and explain the one hard rule: if a fish dies, remove it promptly with the net you leave by the tank, because leaving it is what turns one loss into a water-quality crash.
Writing that visit routine, the feeding portions, and the emergency contacts into KinsLe's Care Pass gives your sitter time-limited access to exactly the instructions the tank needs, so the angelfish get the same four careful visits whether or not you are reachable.