I have just one word for my fellow aquarium owners who rely on their thermometers and heaters… don’t. Everyone talks about how bad aquarium heaters are, what they don’t tell you is that the thermometers aren’t exactly the most precise pieces of equipment either.

Lemme lay down the time line here of what happened to us the other day. A problem that has been causing me problems since day 1 in my tank and I never knew it due to fault equipment.

04/30/07 – Fishtank 1.0
We started the tank setup. Added water, dropped in the thermometer. Put in the heater and started running it. Over the next few days, we managed to stabilize tank temperature at 76 degrees by setting the heater to 83. Kinda odd that it is that much off, but hey, even the guy who sold us the thing said they weren’t that accurate. And the heater was down in the sump, not in the tank. So whatever. At this point in time, I don’t know any better but the thermometer readout is good so we decide to just go with it!

06/30/07 – Panic mode
I wake up and go to feed the fish and notice that the tank temperature is down over ten degrees… it’s 65 in there! PANIC! Something is very wrong. It’s the heater or the thermometer. So, I toss the thermometer in a bucket of cold water, temp readout drops to 50 degrees. Then on to a bucket of hot water, temp readout starts rising. Thermometer is working so I pull it out and shove it back in the tank. It must be the heater! Toss the heater in a bucket of cold water and crank it up. It kicks on but takes forever to get the water warm. Hmmmm… yup. Must be the heater. (I’m totally not thinking here and not realizing that heaters don’t work well in STILL water. Oops.) Off we go to our favorite LFS… no heaters in stock. Okay, plan B, Petco… The only acceptable choices are a 300w AGA heater made by Hydor or a 200w Visi-Therm Stealth. Well, the Visi-Therm gets higher ratings most of the time and all, but seeing as I have a dead one at home… forget that. AGA/Hydor it is! We get home and drop this thing into the sump… we set it at 67, trying to be conservative and not shock the fish again. It kicks on for about 30 seconds and then shuts off so I bump it up to 68. Again, 30 seconds. I pull the heater out and slam it into a bucket of cold water. It stays on for several minutes before it kicks off. At this point, I should really have a clue as to what’s really broken here but it’s just not registering. I’m in too much of a panic about which pieces of livestock i’m about to lose!

07/01/07 – Problem solved!
Temperature still not rising. No matter what I do, I can’t get the temp over 67 and kicking the A/C on in the house drops it back to 66. How weird. Just then, the still water paradigm hits me and we notice the water level in the wet/dry is WAY too high compared to normal. Oddly enough, the skimmer hasn’t erupted salt water like it normally does, but that’s a story for another day. After some serious amounts of checking, turns out the filter medium was too dirty. We recently switched from the super porous spongy stuff to the thin felt-like stuff. Gets ALOT more out of the water, but nobody told us that you have to clean that stuff once a week and sometimes even more! Oops. We pull that out and clean it, water levels return to normal and the temp in the tank goes up 1 degree within a few minutes. That must have been it. Not wanting to shock the fish, I set the heater back down to 68 and wait a while. Heater keeps cutting off. Probably b/c it’s too tall for our sump. Knowing now that it probably wasn’t the original heater but the filtration material… I replace the new heater with the old one.

07/02/07 (Early morning) – Maybe that wasn’t it. Part 1
It’s midnight, i’m still up. Temp still won’t go up. The heater is now at 72. By 2AM, i’m done. I reinsert the new heater and go to bed. The girlfriend wakes up in the morning, sees the temp still low and bumps it to 75. I wake up, see the higher heat but still nothing on the thermometer and throw in the towel. It must be this new heater not getting the right amount of flow. Next thing you know, the skimmer is out, the filter material is gone, chemi-pure is out… we’re at max flow… nothing. Still nothing. Same old 67 degrees in the tank and the heater is on 80.

07/02/07 (Evening) – New sump… that’ll fix it!
For quite some time, i’ve been wanting a bigger sump. The wet/dry is fun and all, but I want a better skimmer and some more room to work. And I don’t use the bio-balls anyway, so the wet/dry is nothing but a fancy airation chamber with tight proportions and a huge potential for overflow. I’d also like to have some more water in the system. 50g is fine and all but 60g would be even better! So at around 5pm, the swap begins. By 8pm, the new sump is in, heater in place, and operation is restored. Just to help out, I used the powerhead from the old skimmer to push water over the heater and keep things moving in the sump… but I still have the same problem. Can’t make the water heat up any more than 68, yet i’m sweating when i’m around the tank and it’s humid as hell. Then it hits me… It’s the thermometer. It’s always been the thermometer. It was the thermometer on day one. Back to the early picture, the tank was never 76, even though that thermometer showed it. My 150w visi-therm heater was set to 83 and if I had to guess, the temp was somewhere in the low 80′s. It explains a lot. I’ve had really bad problems with algae, even before my T5HO lighting setup. Oh sure, all tanks have algae, but not this bad. The tank has been a petri dish for algae.

I slapped another heater in there… New Heater : 83F, Old Heater : 66F. The fact that I haven’t lost livestock at this point is AMAZING. Now I begin the slow process of backing the temp down slowly so I don’t shock them.

07/03/07 – Another Thermometer?
While at the fish store, I picked up another heater for when I do water changes. Sure enough, it’s within 1 degree of the other new heater, and at least 10 degrees away from the old one. Tank temp is now 81F.

07/04/07 – Happy Fish
Tank temp is now 79F and i’ll continue to lower it slowly until I get to 76F. My fish are very actively swimming now, the Coral Beauty isn’t attacking the smaller fish anymore, and everyone is eating like mad. I fed both of the anemones today and they’re all puffed up and happy. I’ve been adding a touch of Garlic to their food lately so the fish colors and bright and vibrant. Everything looks great!

The moral of this story is that you need two heaters and two thermometers. Also, heaters stick so use an external temperature probe and an aqua controller so the heater doesn’t stick in the “on” position and boil your fish.

* Thanks to Jungle Rob for his speech bubble idea and the template drawing.

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