Heater overheated

[bfpierce99]

HELP! I just came home from being gone all day. My heater overheated. Tank was in the low to mid 90's. snails and two shrimp are toast. royal gramma appears dead. clownfish still alive. look like some of my coral kicked it to. not even sure where to start at this point....... will all my coral die? i have two torchs, couple birdnest, acan, etc.,etc.

i pulled the heater and now expect the temp to drop to something that is too cold ...

this is terrible.

32 cube with a 150w cobalt

 

[vetteguy53081]

Get yourself a bag of ice and float it in the sump. It will GRADUALLY bring temperature down. Might as well grab a second one in case you need to lower tank temp more and if not needed- Get the whiskey out. . .Its Friday !!

 

[Reef.]

I wouldn’t add ice if you don’t have another heater or the room the tank is in is cold, the temp will drop soon enough with no heater.

The tank can last for a long time with no heater, turn up the room temp if you can.

try and get another heater too, if shops are closed, order one online and put a shout out for any local reefers to lend you one.

 

[ZoixDark]

Some stuff might survive. Sorry to hear about the failure.

Obviously too late for this situation but for anyone reading. Please backup your heater with a temp controller. Inkbirds can be had for 30-40 bucks on amazon. Also consider your heater disposable and replace every 1-2 years.

 

[Mike from TN]

If you already pulled the heater, crank up the temp in your house to the high 70’s. That should prevent the tank from getting too cold until you can get another heater. Remove whatever livestock that has perished to prevent contaminating your water.
Sorry to hear of your losses but maybe you can keep from losing any more. Deep Breath and don’t panic!
We‘re all here to help you through this.

 

[Joe31415]

In addition to what other said. Consider two heaters each rated for about 75% of what you need. That way, if one stops heating you have time to get another one, if it gets stuck on, it takes longer to cook the tank.

In the mean time, since you know it's stuck on, you could put it back in the tank and manually turn it on and off to keep it regulated until you go to bed and plan to get a new one in the morning.

I see you're on the West coast. Is there a Petco or Petsmart nearby that's still open? Otherwise, if it were me, I'd go run to Walmart (or maybe Target?). I assume it's still open and you can grab a new one (or multiple new ones, depending on the wattages they offer).

 

[salty joe]

What a bummer.
If the only thing wrong with the heater is it failed 'on', you could plug it in for a short while, then unplug it for a short while to get you through until you get a new heater, good luck.

 

[DinoMagnet]

Wow how unfortunate!! Does anyone know what causes this? I’m actually looking at a 300w cobalt for my tank.

 

[Joe31415]

Wow how unfortunate!! Does anyone know what causes this? I’m actually looking at a 300w cobalt for my tank.

WAG, the bimetal switch welds closed after enough cycles. DC power has a habit of sparking when the circuit is opened. If you or the OP wants to do a post mortem, cut it open and see if the switch is welded closed or there's some other issue. I'm surprised, after decades of making heaters they haven't found a way to deal with such a common problem.

 

[bfpierce99]

Some stuff might survive. Sorry to hear about the failure.

Obviously too late for this situation but for anyone reading. Please backup your heater with a temp controller. Inkbirds can be had for 30-40 bucks on amazon. Also consider your heater disposable and replace every 1-2 years.

I just bought two eheims and an an inkbird. get them tomorrow.

 

[bfpierce99]

WAG, the bimetal switch welds closed after enough cycles. DC power has a habit of sparking when the circuit is opened. If you or the OP wants to do a post mortem, cut it open and see if the switch is welded closed or there's some other issue. I'm surprised, after decades of making heaters they haven't found a way to deal with such a common problem.

i will do a post mortem, but once I fix the situation in a couple days. it might be whiskey time.....

 

[Gernader]

Sorry to hear that. I don’t trust cobalt heaters. I got a similar story that happened recently. So, when I was working at a LFS, I got a call from someone saying that his tank got so cloudy and everything died including fish and corals. However, he didn’t know what was the reason. Well, when I came over to his place, it turns out the heater malfunctioned and guess what brand it was. Yep, you guessed it... Cobalt. The weird thing is that the cobalt heater was set to 78 degrees and it was working fine for months, but it went up to 96 degrees out of nowhere!

 

[ZoixDark]

Wow how unfortunate!! Does anyone know what causes this? I’m actually looking at a 300w cobalt for my tank.

There's nothing inherently wrong with cobalt. All heaters eventually fail. Just put a backup on it. Set your heater temp and use an inkbird set to kill power to the heater a couple degrees higher and you should be ok.

 

[wonroc]

update

 

[Mjl714]

HELP! I just came home from being gone all day. My heater overheated. Tank was in the low to mid 90's. snails and two shrimp are toast. royal gramma appears dead. clownfish still alive. look like some of my coral kicked it to. not even sure where to start at this point....... will all my coral die? i have two torchs, couple birdnest, acan, etc.,etc.

i pulled the heater and now expect the temp to drop to something that is too cold ...

this is terrible.

32 cube with a 150w cobalt

Wow, 150w is a lot for 32gallon. I use a 150w on my 75gal, which also has a 15 gallon refugium. Once you get this corrected, I’d go smaller on the heater, it’ll give you more wiggle room.

 

[bfpierce99]

I'm slowly bringing the temp down. i get a new heater and a back up eheim tomorrow, plus an ink bird. it looks like both shrimp died. clownfish and blue green chromie still moving around. some of my snails died. royal gramma prob died in my rocks. my two birdnests are nearly white so I assume they are both toast. do i leave skeleton in my tank? my really nice torch lost what seems to be all of its tentacles. there is a stump of about 1.5 inches so is there anything alive inside still? other torch seems fine. zoas seem curled up but prob ok. i pulled the shrimp but don't know which snails to pull yet so will leave them until tomorrow when I do a 25% water change and put on the new heater. thanks for everyone's help. the one beautiful torch was prob the most expensive and heartbreaking loss.

 

[salty joe]

I've heard of corals 'coming back to life' after quite awhile, like a year or so.

 

[bfpierce99]

I want to thank everyone here for the support.

Here are three corals that got hit very hard. Are they toast? Should I pull them from the tank or wait and see if they come back. Obviously given the size of the torch base, he was a biggie.

 

[zalick]

Sps definitely looks toast. Probably the LPS too. But I always leave in because you never know if they might come back.

Also, to what Joe said above, it's much better to have multiple smaller heaters IMO. If one fails off or on, you are better off.

I personally get titanium heaters without a thermostat and use an inkbird plus my apex. The glass heaters and their thermostats fail too often for my liking.

 

[Mjl714]

In my case, I use two Eheim heaters and get them calibrated to my preferred temp range 78 - 78.5. Then I make one my primary heater, and second one becomes a fail safe (only used if primary heater fails) both are them monitored by my Apex. I also tend to buy wattage, which is less than recommended as kind of another fail safe. Works great for me.