Sink heater question

[Reef-junky]

Do you guys think this would work for a 1000gal tank? Was thinking I could make a heater coil with a closed loop.

 

[Brew12]

Do you guys think this would work for a 1000gal tank? Was thinking I could make a heater coil with a closed loop.

I wouldn't use it because of the metal piping internal to the unit.

 

[George Lopez]

Brass fittings... I wouldn't use it

 

[Reef-junky]

Plan wouldn’t be to run salt water through it but regular water and make a heat exchanger. The heat exchanger would be salt safe. I would just heat up water in a loop. Something like a hose would get put in a sump and be used to heat the water in that.

 

[Brew12]

Plan wouldn’t be to run salt water through it but regular water and make a heat exchanger. The heat exchanger would be salt safe. I would just heat up water in a loop. Something like a hose would get put in a sump and be used to heat the water in that.

I'm with you now. For some reason I missed that. It could work but I'm not sure how energy efficient it would be.

 

[George Lopez]

Ok I'm good with that plan too

 

[Reef-junky]

Not sure how efficient this would be but I guess a few people with large tanks have done this through their hot water heater.

 

[Reef-junky]

Wondering if I could make some kind of heat exchanger. I would probably have to have some kind of salt resistant metal or glass.

 

[Skydvr]

Titanium is good, though not cheap.

I was looking to make a small chiller using titanium tubing to submerge in the sump, but was having difficulty finding something cost effective.

There was a post not to long ago about someone adding a titanium spa heat exchanger to their tank using their home hot water heater as the supply. It wasn't cheap, but for the size tank they were working with, it was cost effective as traditional heaters were going to be close to that anyway (the heat exchanger doesn't need to be replaced every couple of years) and the water heater was more efficient than the aquarium heaters.

For this to be feasible, it needs to be more energy efficient than the aquarium heaters and the cost needs to be close to what replacement heaters would run over the life of the system. Unless you aren't overly concerned about the cost investment and are just looking to do something that is a bit diffeent and has other benefits like reliability and faster response time for better temperature stability.

 

[Reef-junky]

Yeah I’m now thinking a heat exchanger is the way to go after looking into this some more. Wondering if I could use this sink heater to run something like that. The type that has a tube inside a PVC pipe. If I bought aquarium heaters I would need 4 of the biggest heaters I could get probably 5 to get them to turn off a decent amount.

 

[Chuk]

Assuming you are maintaining 80F in the tank with using 140F hot water through a HX you get a theoretical max of ~120,000 BTU/hr heat input to your tank. This would be able to raise 1000 gal by 14.5 deg F/hr. Assuming your controller maintains +/- 1 you need actually use ~8,350 btu/hr which equates to ~2,450 watts. On a 115 VAC circuit this about 22 amps. Typical household circuits are 15 or 20 amps. I think you'll probably need a bigger unit that runs off of 220 VAC rather than 120. 220 VAC drops your amperage to ~12 amps.

 

[laverda]

My experience with those units is they do not heat much water. If 4 people wash there hands the 4 gets Luke warm water.
Find a broken chiller and take the titanium heat exchanger out of it. The heat exchangers virtually never are the problem. You may be able to find one free that way. You can also buy heat exchangers online.