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Hello hive minds,
I am a novice reefers, engaged in reef keeping for past two years, with 3 tanks , 1 29G biocube and two 3G pice tanks. I always used heaters with 78F fixed temperature settings with my tanks and as of now have never encountered any challenges with it. That said, I am building an open source, open hardware DIY reef tank controller, and as part of that I recently built a temperature monitor that shows me temperature trends for my tanks, this has revealed a daily cycle of 78 to 76 F temperature across all my tanks. And now, I am curious about if this is good or bad for my tank. From all my reading across different forums and online blogs it seems that temperature between 76-80F should be OK with most corals, though exact values might different depending up coral origin. It also seems (from data available at NOAA's website) our oceans exhibit seasonal cycle for temperatures. But can daily cycle's or fluctuations (albeit 2 degree Fahrenheit) have some ill effect for corals?
The reason I am asking this, I am planning to build a temperature controller next, which will switch on/off heater or chiller/fan when the temperature goes beyond a certain range. I plan to keep things configurable, but for I want to have a best known settings out of the box. Should the controller enforce a specific temperature (e.g. 78F) or a range (76<-> 79 F) ? Also, anyone knows of any reference work on effect of temperature fluctuations (with 76->80F range) on reef tank?
I am a novice reefers, engaged in reef keeping for past two years, with 3 tanks , 1 29G biocube and two 3G pice tanks. I always used heaters with 78F fixed temperature settings with my tanks and as of now have never encountered any challenges with it. That said, I am building an open source, open hardware DIY reef tank controller, and as part of that I recently built a temperature monitor that shows me temperature trends for my tanks, this has revealed a daily cycle of 78 to 76 F temperature across all my tanks. And now, I am curious about if this is good or bad for my tank. From all my reading across different forums and online blogs it seems that temperature between 76-80F should be OK with most corals, though exact values might different depending up coral origin. It also seems (from data available at NOAA's website) our oceans exhibit seasonal cycle for temperatures. But can daily cycle's or fluctuations (albeit 2 degree Fahrenheit) have some ill effect for corals?
The reason I am asking this, I am planning to build a temperature controller next, which will switch on/off heater or chiller/fan when the temperature goes beyond a certain range. I plan to keep things configurable, but for I want to have a best known settings out of the box. Should the controller enforce a specific temperature (e.g. 78F) or a range (76<-> 79 F) ? Also, anyone knows of any reference work on effect of temperature fluctuations (with 76->80F range) on reef tank?
