Catastrophe

[Kossy]

A friend of mine just lost like 5 discus and all his fish in the tank due to a heater breaking and literaly boiling the fish.

 

[CFC]

Thats sad,but another lesson in why we all (myself included) should make sure we get the very best equipment we can and always spread the load between two of each item.If they had used two smaller heaters and one of them stuck on then it would not have been powerful enough to do any harm.The same applies to filters (as i learned last week) spread the load between two equal sized filters and if one fails the other will be able to keep your fish alive until you get a replacement.

 

[Dave]

CFC,

If they had used two smaller heaters and one of them stuck on then it would not have been powerful enough to do any harm.

A similar post has come up before on this. Surely if you have 2 smaller heaters, and 1 gets stuck on, it would still boil the fish alive but it take twice as long as it would if you had 1 big heater. If you see what I mean

Kossy, sorry to hear about the discus what a nightmare I don't know how you could prevent this but as CFC says its best to buy a good quality heater, but this still does not give you full peace of mind. Realistically you would want some kinda seperate heat sensor that would trip the power to your heater if the water got to warm. But that has its problems too.

 

[CFC]

If using two less powerful heaters instead of one big heater then if one fails the second will keep the tank warm for long enough to keep the fish alive,on the other hand if the heater gets stuck on the thermostat on the working heater will stop the element from heating the water any further,so the tank is heated by just the one faulty heater which is not powerful enough to heat the water to a dangerous temperature.

I hope this makes it a little clearer.

 

[smb]

If using two less powerful heaters instead of one big heater then if one fails the second will keep the tank warm for long enough to keep the fish alive,on the other hand if the heater gets stuck on the thermostat on the working heater will stop the element from heating the water any further,so the tank is heated by just the one faulty heater which is not powerful enough to heat the water to a dangerous temperature.

I hope this makes it a little clearer.

Yep. I can't agree more CFC.

With 2 heaters and each at half the tanks capacity, it can't overheat. Heaters are too inconsistent for me to ever do otherwise.

This is exactly what I said a couple weeks ago in a thread. I think I was the one Dave was talking about.

 

[Dave]

Ok Im Confused now Im either being stupid here or we're misunderstanding one another,

If using two less powerful heaters instead of one big heater then if one fails the second will keep the tank warm for long enough to keep the fish alive

True I agree with this.

on the other hand if the heater gets stuck on the thermostat on the working heater will stop the element from heating the water any further,so the tank is heated by just the one faulty heater which is not powerful enough to heat the water to a dangerous temperature.

No, this is where I don't agree.

If one heater gets stuck on the element will continue to heat and will not stop. The second heater (the one thats still working) will continue to operate untill the temperature of the water reaches the thermostatic value. This heater will then stop. However the water temp will still continue to slowly rise as the heater element cannot switch off.

It doesn't matter what power the heater is it will still heat the water to the same temperature, it will just take longer.

I suppose for example: If you have a tank that Radiates 12W of power and you have a heater of 10W, your tank would never over heat. In this case I would agree with you, but who really knows the amount of heat radiation of their tank?

In conclusion I think there cannot be a true answer unless you know the true power specs of the water and glass in the tank.

Well now my head hurts and now I have to do some work

 

[ste2k3]

i think wat people are saying is that if one heater stays ON, then its going to give you more time to notice or if the tank is in a cool place, then it may never reach extreemly high temperatures.