Heater

wvfish1

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Would it be good to put two 40 gallon rated heaters on each side of a 75 gallon tank?
 
First; welcome to R2R! Thanks for signing up and being an active part of the community. :-)

Two 40gal heaters - which are about 150 watts each, I'm guessing? - should end up with enough power to heat a 75gal tank (watts are watts, basically), assuming that the ambient room temperature isn't too far out of normal (not in an uninsulated garage or the like). And you will get some small bit of redundancy from having two heaters instead of just one - it a heating element should fail in the "off" manner, the other would help to keep the tank heat from dropping too low; though it would drop some.
Better would be to use two heaters capable of heating the full tank individually, and then running a degree lower than the other. In that way, the primary heater (the one turned up slightly higher) would carry most of the load while the secondary would kick in when it needed help. The secondary would also be used far less often, so should be less susceptible to a catastrophic failure - meaning that it could act as a full backup in the case of a failure of the primary heater.
Still; heaters capable of maintaining a 75gal tank are slightly larger, so there's also a question of the aesthetics if the heater(s) are to be located in your display.

TL;DR - two 150W heaters are likely marginally better to use than one 300W heater.
 
First; welcome to R2R! Thanks for signing up and being an active part of the community. :-)

Two 40gal heaters - which are about 150 watts each, I'm guessing? - should end up with enough power to heat a 75gal tank (watts are watts, basically), assuming that the ambient room temperature isn't too far out of normal (not in an uninsulated garage or the like). And you will get some small bit of redundancy from having two heaters instead of just one - it a heating element should fail in the "off" manner, the other would help to keep the tank heat from dropping too low; though it would drop some.
Better would be to use two heaters capable of heating the full tank individually, and then running a degree lower than the other. In that way, the primary heater (the one turned up slightly higher) would carry most of the load while the secondary would kick in when it needed help. The secondary would also be used far less often, so should be less susceptible to a catastrophic failure - meaning that it could act as a full backup in the case of a failure of the primary heater.
Still; heaters capable of maintaining a 75gal tank are slightly larger, so there's also a question of the aesthetics if the heater(s) are to be located in your display.

TL;DR - two 150W heaters are likely marginally better to use than one 300W heater.
I was thinking if you could put a heater in middle of takeoff that is capable of tank capacity then put one on each end that totals capacity of tank.
Two 40 gal. Capably on each end as opposed to 80 gal. Capably heater in middle. If you put a heater on end, would it not leave one end cooler than the other.
 
You may be overthinking things. Water is a very good conductor of heat. With even just a small flow (return pump, for example), the water temperature will be consistent throughout a 75gal tank with a single heater located pretty much anywhere in the system. Even without any pump involved, it's likely that the conductive movement from the heater itself would even out all the water in a 75gal (though for other reasons this is a moot point as a reef tank would always have movement).
 

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