Terrible Advice Tuesdays: The Real Reason For Multiple Heaters
Terrible Advice Tuesdays: Due to the vast temperature gradients between the top and the bottom of your tank, a heater should be placed at the bottom, and at the top of your tank.
The rest of the story: If you wanted to split hairs, then there probably is a slight temperature difference between the water at the sand bed and the water at the top of your tank. However, the slight temperature difference isn’t worth worrying about. Placing a heater at the top, or bottom of your tank isn’t going to make a difference.
Browse the Store! Questions?
The only time that there MAY BE a temp differential would be if your water is stagnant, but who doesn’t run a circulation pump in their tank?
Let see now ,the ocean stays the exact same temp all year round right !
there are cold pockets of water in nature all the time ,Ive experienced this myself many times, I dive alot and you hit patches of cold water as you swim along so minor temp differences are nothing to worry about
The heater should be placed in your sump/refugium…
Seriously when did this advice come out before the invention of power heads, even a backpack filter would mix any thermal stratification, plus a return line. Even if you work on the theory that MH lighting being a large heat source the most basic filtration would send the hot layer over the weir into our overflow boxes.
Besides these reasons having 2 heaters always will lead to 1 of them doing all the work as they need to be set to have their thermostats kick in at the same temp. I’ve tried to synchronise heaters in a basin with hot & cold taps and a good digital temp gauge & although I get both heaters (separately to turn) at precisely the same degree, set on both heaters, invariably 1 heater will do most of the work. I have 1 under the return that is pumping down, the other heater set either in the sump or in the overflow box, same brand. forget what the dial says as they aren’t calibrated exactly the same, that’s why I use a good digital thermometer.
Mark ?
Interesting terrible advice… However, whoever said this obviously didn’t take into account the flow rates we have running through our aquarium! If you have decent flow throughout, the water should be uniformly heated because of the mixing of the water. Take for example my reef tank with my ecotech vortech MP-40 pumps. My heater is is my sump and with the power of my return pump combined with my two ecotechs the 125 gallon display is uniformly heated throughout. The originator of this advice needs to take a science class! Lol
Way to focused on the numbers and gear. In the photography world some spend so much time finding the slightest imperfections of cameras and lenses that they never take any real pictures. They call it “Measurebation”. Some people in this hobby seem to be the same way in chasing numbers and parameters. I laugh when I see some one telling another they should raise their CA from 395 to 420. The tank can’t tell the difference and neither can the test kits.
I use a temp controler. I set both my heaters to max and let my controller I gauge the heat as it is set. That way both heaters are working at the same time. One does not do all the work.
I also have a digital thermometer is the display and the refugium. There is always a 0.5 degree Celsius difference between the two. Always.
Two heaters for the reason in the terrible advice sounds like major overkill. One thing I have been considering is a possible benefit of using 2.
I recently had a heart-breaker when my wonderfully matched quad of Randall’s Pistol Shrimp and Hi-fin Gobies, in their last week of quarantine, were mercilessly cooked by a faulty heater raising the tank temperature to 37 Celcius.
This led me to fret about the possibility, however unlikely, of this happening in my main reef display. One thing I considered is that if I used 2 smaller heaters to heat the display then the second could kick in when the first could not cope but if one of them were to go wrong then it shouldn’t be able to raise the temperature as drastically as if it were a single higher wattage heater.
I have considered a reef controller and the Apex system is my ultimate goal but this is just not within my budget at present.
Any thoughts?