My pain, your gain- a reminder

[Daniel Waters]

I wanted to share with the reefing community a recent screw up I had. It's never easy admitting mistakes, so I hope my doing so will help prevent a future catastrophe for a fellow reefer.

I will keep my story short and sweet. I had removed a 6" Austraslian Harlequin Tusk from my main display tank into a temporary tank i had set up for him this past weekend (sunday). This morning I found the tusk dead. I immediately began to brainstorm...was it an ammonia spike, stray voltage, contamination, stress from being moved, or ? I then noticed my extra heater I use in situations like this was on. I went and got a temperature probe and tested the water....85, 87, 89, 90, 91. At 92+ degrees I became disgusted and pulled the probe out. Mystery solved. My spare heater stuck in the on position! Note, I run multiple undersized heaters in my main display and use a temperature controller. If you aren't doing some sort of redundancy or monitoring or fail safe, you are flirting with a potential future disaster. In my case, I was just lazy and didn't put a temperature gauge in my temporary tank, as I've always used this spare heater and never had an issue so I just assumed it would be fine for a few days (Murphy's law strikes again). I could have easily caught the problem before it got too bad if I had used a $2 thermometer to monitor things. I'm sure there are several lessons that can be learned from this. I will leave it to each of you readers to take away whatever pertinent nugget of wisdom you can gleam from my mistake. I hope this may help avoid a future mistake by a fellow reefer. Until then, I have been found guilty and will be paying the stupid tax.

 

[Waters]

I think anybody that has maintained tanks for a while has had the same issue as you.....it only takes one faulty heater to make you start using a controller or multiple undersized heaters. I have a bucket full of dead heaters that all have faulty thermostats :-(

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Thankfully I haven't had this issue but I know my day will come. Until then, I'm going to keep trusting in my Eheim Jager heaters, they're supposed to have lowest probability of sticking due to their switch design but that doesn't mean it won't happen one day.

 

[Daniel Waters]

Thankfully I haven't had this issue but I know my day will come. Until then, I'm going to keep trusting in my Eheim Jager heaters, they're supposed to have lowest probability of sticking due to their switch design but that doesn't mean it won't happen one day.

Oddly, it was an Eheim jager heater! And they have typically been bullet proof for me as well, which is why I didn't bother putting a thermometer on the temporary tank.

 

[penguin_free]

I saw that happen enough times at my first job during high school at a lfs, fortunately I have never trusted an aquarium heater to control itself since. Amazon has digital temp controls for $14 that do a nice job of preventing overheating... although the thermocouples don't seem to last a long time like the more expensive units come with.

 

[PAXpress]

I wanted to share with the reefing community a recent screw up I had. It's never easy admitting mistakes, so I hope my doing so will help prevent a future catastrophe for a fellow reefer.

I will keep my story short and sweet. I had removed a 6" Austraslian Harlequin Tusk from my main display tank into a temporary tank i had set up for him this past weekend (sunday). This morning I found the tusk dead. I immediately began to brainstorm...was it an ammonia spike, stray voltage, contamination, stress from being moved, or ? I then noticed my extra heater I use in situations like this was on. I went and got a temperature probe and tested the water....85, 87, 89, 90, 91. At 92+ degrees I became disgusted and pulled the probe out. Mystery solved. My spare heater stuck in the on position! Note, I run multiple undersized heaters in my main display and use a temperature controller. If you aren't doing some sort of redundancy or monitoring or fail safe, you are flirting with a potential future disaster. In my case, I was just lazy and didn't put a temperature gauge in my temporary tank, as I've always used this spare heater and never had an issue so I just assumed it would be fine for a few days (Murphy's law strikes again). I could have easily caught the problem before it got too bad if I had used a $2 thermometer to monitor things. I'm sure there are several lessons that can be learned from this. I will leave it to each of you readers to take away whatever pertinent nugget of wisdom you can gleam from my mistake. I hope this may help avoid a future mistake by a fellow reefer. Until then, I have been found guilty and will be paying the stupid tax.

My living room tank has an apex with two temperature probes... however my bedroom tank does not have any heater controller, I've actually been pretty worried as of late even though nothing has happened. I'll lose a lot more than one fish though if mine cooks the tank. Think I'll have to do something about this soon.

 

[nautical_nathaniel]

Oddly, it was an Eheim jager heater! And they have typically been bullet proof for me as well, which is why I didn't bother putting a thermometer on the temporary tank.

No way! I'll be keeping a close eye on mine! I've had it almost 2 years now with zero issues.

 

[Greybeard]

Unfortunate... and more common that you might imagine. As Daniel said "It's never easy admitting mistakes". I'm convinced that many of these go unreported.

$20 heater. One piece of equipment that remains virtually unchanged from the very first aquarium I set up in the late 1970's. Yeah, that one hung over the side, rather than being fully submersible. Big deal. You can buy a brand new heater based on the same cheap bimetal thermostat right now. Or, you can get one with a $3 internal electronic thermostat. Neither will have any redundancy, most of them still made of glass. Great idea, put a high temp electrical appliance in a glass tube, suspended in salt water. Who's idea was this, anyway?

Why nobody makes a decent heater, with dual thermostats and a built in circuit breaker, made from titanium, is simply beyond my ability to understand.

 

[Daniel Waters]

My living room tank has an apex with two temperature probes... however my bedroom tank does not have any heater controller, I've actually been pretty worried as of late even though nothing has happened. I'll lose a lot more than one fish though if mine cooks the tank. Think I'll have to do something about this soon.

I don't use an apex, but have a temperature controller on my main tank. I run two smaller heaters connected by a 2 to 1 plug into the controller. I set the heaters at 82 and the main controller to 80. This way, the heaters stay in the on position all the time (versus cutting on and off and wearing out / breaking). The main controller, which theoretically should have a higher quality switch does the on / off switching. Should the controller stick on, the individual heaters theoretically should cut off at 82. Also, since I'm running multiple, undersized heaters, even if one of those did get stuck on also, it should not be able to heat up the tank too severely or quickly enough that it isn't caught in time.

 

[Daniel Waters]

No way! I'll be keeping a close eye on mine! I've had it almost 2 years now with zero issues.

Trust me, I get pretty OCD about things and keep an eye on things as well...by then, it will be too late. I kept my eye on some medium rare baked Harlequin Tusk this morning. And then I remembered thinking, now that I think about it, that heater did seem to be on a lot yesterday, but I never thought anything of it, because, hey, I've used that heater for years and it's never failed! Until it does. ..

 

[penguin_free]

That's one thing I like about the cheap amazon controller... the big red display is hard to miss. When the thermocouple went up, it didnt take long to notice the controller reading 'HH' instead of '79'. The one from Marine Depot that I have on the main tank, I have to remember to actually look at when I'm checking the skimmer, dosing, filling the ato, and whatnot.

 

[Greybeard]

BRS did a video on heaters. Worth watching.

An aquarium controller, even a low end one, paired with a heater (I selected a titanium tube model), allows you to have an external thermostat, a backup thermostat (internal), and an ALARM when temp varies outside of a given window. Reefkeeper light basic is what, $125? You get 4 outlets. Say, 2 for your lights, rather than buying an additional timer, you can even kill the lights automatically if the temp starts to exceed your setpoint. One for your skimmer... I like being able to leave my skimmer off for a time after a power failure, to keep from overflowing the skimmer cup on startup with a higher than normal sump water level. One for whatever... refugeum light, perhaps? Seems the best reasonably priced solution I'm aware of.

 

[Empress]

Silly as this may sound, I use my fingers to test the temperature every time I feed the fish (3+ times a day). For some odd reason I can tell if the water is too warm or too cold. Just like Humblefish can smell ammonia. [emoji225]

 

[Tim Olson]

Thanks for reminder and sorry for losing the Tusk.

I've had a few heaters go bad over the years, but they haven't stuck ON luckily. For the last few years, though, I've used a Ranco temperature controller and a temperature alarm on my thermometer. So far they've worked fine, but as Murphy states ..."If anything can go wrong, it will".

All the best!

 

[Bunnee911]

I saw that happen enough times at my first job during high school at a lfs, fortunately I have never trusted an aquarium heater to control itself since. Amazon has digital temp controls for $14 that do a nice job of preventing overheating... although the thermocouples don't seem to last a long time like the more expensive units come with.

I run one of these. I can throw the wiring diagram up if anyone is interested.

 

[Rufus’ goofs]

I had one heater get stuck in the on position. Fortunately for me it was just a batch of saltwater for a water change.

After that I got the ink bird temperature controllers with a nice large fan next to each tank.
I still verify the temperature probe every couple weeks with an infrared thermometer, so I can quickly check what the temperature of the probe actually is.

 

[Mark Gray]

I have had 2 heaters fail and kill fish. both were a long time ago one was a fresh water tank with a clown knife fish I had grown for years he was at least 3 foot long. very sad when I lost him, the other where 2 clown fish in a 30 gallon. Now I love my controllers won't run with out one.

 

[penguin_free]

I run one of these. I can throw the wiring diagram up if anyone is interested.

I found they work fine with the thermocouple off the little watch battery operated digital thermometers from Petco too... The battery in mine died and I broke it getting the old one out, so I figured I would try it with the Amazon temp control the thermocouple had died on. Being a sealed plastic unit, hopefully it'll hold up better. Reads within a degree of 98.6 when I stuck it under my tongue for a few minutes, so can't be that far off at 80

 

[penguin_free]

Silly as this may sound, I use my fingers to test the temperature every time I feed the fish (3+ times a day). For some odd reason I can tell if the water is too warm or too cold. Just like Humblefish can smell ammonia. [emoji225]

If I have an ammonia spike, my dog pees on the floor next to the tank to let me know.




Kidding