The Gold Standard for Aquarium Heating System Redundancy

naterealbig · Mar 27, 2020

Copingwithpods said:
You can follow the redundancy rabbit hole all the way down to China, have back ups and back ups for your backs up and ups and generators or solar panels and so on. None of these are really needed if the system in place is well maintained.

Unless you are keeping a goblin shark or something extremely exotic the 3 layers of redundancy I mentioned are enough.

"I am open to the idea that I am incorrect here, and in this case would be open to consider that it may not be worth the time and effort to put into this subject"

This, it simply isn't worth the effort beyond having simple effective back ups. You can drive yourself mad thinking about this stuff, gfci tripping, power outages, heaters exploding, heaters breaking the sump glass, temperature controller failing, wifi failing not getting alerts and so on.

I will continue to thoughtfully consider all ideas.... I didn't think I was chasing down a myriad of possibilities in my example - but a solution for a real scenario, which would cost me $30 and the time it took to plug one of my heaters into a different outlet. Perhaps not worth it to some, but to me this seemed within the realm of being both "reasonable" and effective. Thank you for your ideas.

Copingwithpods · Mar 27, 2020

naterealbig said:
I will continue to thoughtfully consider all ideas.... I didn't think I was chasing down a myriad of possibilities in my example - but a solution for a real scenario, which would cost me $30 and the time it took to plug one of my heaters into a different outlet. Perhaps not worth it to some, but to me this seemed within the realm of being both "reasonable" and effective. Thank you for your ideas.

It's always a good idea to plug in all redundancies (heaters, battery backups, backup return pumps) into not only a different outlet but a different circuit in your home. No point in doing it in a different outlet if one breaker can take both out.

DanConnor · Mar 27, 2020

I didn't realize that verbiage could be too verbose!

naterealbig · Mar 27, 2020

Copingwithpods said:
It's always a good idea to plug in all redundancies (heaters, battery backups, backup return pumps) into not only a different outlet but a different circuit in your home. No point in doing it in a different outlet if one breaker can take both out.

One more thing that has crossed my mind before, but I never truly considered - thank you. I will add this to the list, and hopefully can put something together in the end in a format that is easy to understand, and comprehensive within reason.... Like I mentioned before, I have been in the hobby for 25 years now, and still miss a lot of this stuff. I may be the r2r dunce, but in the event it's not just me, maybe there are others that can be enlightened.