HEATER ISSUES & FAVORITE HEATERS! Prevent a tank crash with good heater knowledge!

[ScottB]

I take the belt/suspenders approach with BRS (Inkbird) controllers that are plugged into APEX. My APEX probe thinks the water as a degree warmer than the Inkbird and have to admit that I have not yet taken the step of
a) figuring out which is more correct
b) Calibrating the one that is more "off".

If I put four temp probes in, I get five different answers (jk). What is the THE MOST trustworthy means of testing temperature? Extra credit for an Amazon link.

 

[Tired]

Anything you've checked to be sure it's right. I don't think it's possible to have a temperature probe that can be guaranteed to never be off.

 

[laverda]

I take the belt/suspenders approach with BRS (Inkbird) controllers that are plugged into APEX. My APEX probe thinks the water as a degree warmer than the Inkbird and have to admit that I have not yet taken the step of
a) figuring out which is more correct
b) Calibrating the one that is more "off".

If I put four temp probes in, I get five different answers (jk). What is the THE MOST trustworthy means of testing temperature? Extra credit for an Amazon link.

You need to get a temp probe that has a guaranteed accuracy of plus or minus 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 degrees depending on how accurate you want to be and your budget. The more accurate the more expensive they will be. This typically means a thermometer or temp probe made for something not aquarium related. 99% of aquarium thermometers do not even list any sort of accuracy. The few that do that I have seen are plus or minus 1 or 2 degrees. That means you could by 2 and have a 4 degree difference between them. Others are even worse,
I have one similar to this one -> Hanna temp probe 0.3
Don’t rule out highly accurate scientific grade mercury thermometers. They will never need batteries or calibration,. Just don’t drop them!

 

[Aquanino]

I stick with titanium heaters on main displays controlled by profilux. I use grech or dophin heaters on qt tanks all controlled on stc.

 

[cryptodendrum]

Well, over 29 years, I've come to the conclusion that Eheim/Jager heaters are indeed the best, and can most definitely survive thermal shock scenarios (a few accidental real world tests have occurred). I've never had an Eheim heater explode or shatter or what I'd catagorize as a "die an unexpectedly early death".

In fact, my oldest Eheim heater which was nearly 20 years old (it was the old Green colored model if that tells you anything) just died of old age last year. All my other Eheim heaters - aged anywhere between 2 - 10 years - are all still trucking.

I have had a variety of other branded aquarium heaters fail on me.

I've also gone through (read: failed) about 3 stand alone digital heater controllers fail on me as well. One of these failed in the middle of the night several years ago on a baby clownfish growout system I had, and when it failed, the controller stuck on the ON position. Although my heater's built in thermostat should have then switched off before climbing past 28C, but as Murphy would have it - that silently failed too. And I lost over 100 baby clownfish in one night.

That was my final motivation (almost 4 years ago) to finally create / build my own High Availability Aquarium Controller solution that as a key requirement would be the first Aquarium Controller that could survive a failure of the Aquarium Controller itself; not to mention, it should also not break my bank account.

Created using multiple RaspberryPi's, multiple temp sensors, and network controllable power-bars, my new Aquarium Controller design can survive a catostrophic software or hardware failure, which retires old and often ignored risks related to controller failures that are rarer, but equally high (or higher) impact than a failure of the heater itself. It works a lot like the Space Shuttle / Crew Dragon's flight computers - which are a collection of 5 computers, all checking on each other to make sure the others are all operating as expected. If a failure is detected of one of the 5 computers, one or more of the remaining 4 will jump in and take over. And just like the flight systems of Crew Dragon and the Space Shuttle, my new aquarium controller also sports 5 seperate computing nodes, which will even attempt to recover and restart the failed node, if possible. If not, one of the remaining nodes takes over, while also raising sound effects & Text To Speech alerts and push notifications to my phone.

Or if a temp probe in the sump fails, the system will detect the one errant temp probe failure from a sanity check routine, and switch over to a different probe for heater regulation, while also raising alarms about the errant probe.

The whole solution is built from the ground up with the very important design principle of "Fail Safely by Design". And over 3 years, it's worked amazingly well. I still used (for awhile) some cheaper heaters for my Quarantine & stand alone Baby Clownfish tanks, and last year, I had 2 of these pop on me in the middle of the night, which tripped the GFCI breakers shutting down the whole dedicated fishroom and all the aquariums (they have a dedicated circuit in our house). This also took TWO of my aquarium controller nodes offline as well, but the controller nodes that were not on that same electrical circuit immediately let me know within seconds there was a general critical failure & I was downstairs both times - before the sump had completely back filled from the power cut.

What's more, because the remaining nodes of my aquarium controller were unaffected and still running - I could quickly look at their dashboards & see right away which heater had triggered the GFCI to trip. When one has a dozen heating tubes in various tanks, this was a very welcome bonus, as previously I would have had to do manual fault diagnosis to trace down the cause of the electrical short condition & failure. Instead, it was just a quick look on the control dashboard to see which heater had just turned on at the moment of the GFCI trip. Easy peezy.

How much did the whole build cost me? Less than the price of a single APEX aquarium controller - about 250 euros. Since I built this, I heard last year that Elos introduced a similar distributed controller system. I haven't seen one in action, but if it borrows on my High Availability model, I'll consider that a sincere form of flattery & a compliment to my own ideas. If you are interested in building such a solution yourself - you're in luck - as I used Open Source Software (Home Assistant) to create this, I'm also putting everything I do back into Open Source community. You can find out more how I built my solution, here: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/going-to-next-level-of-aquarium-automation-whos-with-me/ And you can decide how far to take it - you could build your own redudant solution just as an ATO or Heater controller, or take it to the full extreme and have a full featured aquarium controller of your own. And you can decide how much redudancy you want - whether 2 nodes of RaspberryPi's or 3 or 5.

 

[ScottB]

You need to get a temp probe that has a guaranteed accuracy of plus or minus 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 degrees depending on how accurate you want to be and your budget. The more accurate the more expensive they will be. This typically means a thermometer or temp probe made for something not aquarium related. 99% of aquarium thermometers do not even list any sort of accuracy. The few that do that I have seen are plus or minus 1 or 2 degrees. That means you could by 2 and have a 4 degree difference between them. Others are even worse,
I have one similar to this one -> Hanna temp probe 0.3
Don’t rule out highly accurate scientific grade mercury thermometers. They will never need batteries or calibration,. Just don’t drop them!

Thank you!

 

[Gho5t]

I had a Cobalt explode in my tank spewing black goo all over. It was also smoking and I smelled something that smelled like a chemical fire before I found smoke pouring out of the sump. Luckily nothing died from that incident. After that I switched to Ehiem Jagers which I’ve been running for about 4 years and today had one stick on. Caught it fast enough as I was cleaning the tank today. Looking for new options.

 

[Treefer32]

I had a titanium heater that leaked electricity into my tank it was a few years old, had been kept in cold storage when I moved for a couple years, and I had it in my new tank for about 8 months, when one by one my fish suddenly just started dying. I couldn't figure it out because my corals grew faster. In a 3-4 week period my corals had double the amount of growth they normally had. I ran it past a couple people and they suggested checking for voltage.

I discovered one of two heaters were leaking in circles. As soon as I unplugged one of the heaters, the last remaining 3 fish started swimming normally. When I plugged it back in one of them swam in circles. . . I threw the heater out and got two new finnex heaters. That was two years ago and no issues with fish death since. I lost 16 out of 19 fish during that. two of the three jumped to their deaths later and never recovered. I had one fish that survived and he's with me to this day and seems fairly healthy! Swims slower than before, but he's an 7-8 year old black long nose tang. Beautiful fish and very docile for a tang!

I'm looking to replace my heaters now every 2 years. So, looking for if I should stick with Finnex or something else?