The best heater for the money?

[apantale]

Hello,

Starting my trek to coral-dom but I know that temperature is just as important as water quality and light. I have an older heater that I've had for my older aquariums. I need something reliable( of course) and not that pricey. Are submersibles the best? I live in Florida, and for the most part, other than in the winter time, the tank stays pretty constant without the heater, but since corals can be pretty tempermental, at least more than fish it would behoove me to get a good one.

Thanks

[grim]

Hello,

Starting my trek to coral-dom but I know that temperature is just as important as water quality and light. I have an older heater that I've had for my older aquariums. I need something reliable( of course) and not that pricey. Are submersibles the best? I live in Florida, and for the most part, other than in the winter time, the tank stays pretty constant without the heater, but since corals can be pretty tempermental, at least more than fish it would behoove me to get a good one.

Thanks

You can have reliability and quality, or you can have low price, you can not have both at the same time, sorry.

Best heaters? Maybe Clepco or some of the fancy in-line heaters, all run off good temperature controllers of course, but we're talking a minimum of $200 to get into this territory.

Next best? Your option is a cheap submersible heater, no brand stands out as particularly better, searching the internet you can find accounts of every brand failing. I don't trust submersible heaters with built-in temperature controllers. If you use submersibles use a high quality temperature controller to protect you, in almost all cases of heater failure, it's not the heating element that fails, it's the controller. However, even with a controller I'll still recommend multiple heater elements, which brings us to the third best solution.

Use multiple small submersible heaters to protect yourself against any single heater failing in either the ON or OFF position. You'll spend a bit more money doing this, and you lose valuable space in order to place multiple heaters. You will need to be your own temperature controller and monitor the tank temperature with a good digital thermometer. You must be vigilant in watching your temp to quickly catch when a heater fails in the on or off position, however, multiple heaters does buy you valuable time in this scenario.

Worst case? A single submersible heater.

jb

[Reefland]

Hi grim, Welcome to Reefland! Excellent post!

A simple suggestion for a decent submersible heater would be Ebo Jager. There are many available but I have had good success running a couple of smaller Ebo's.

[bkelley02]

I had used two Ebo Jagers controlled by a Medusa in the past with good results. It's been a while though and I'm just getting back into this. Lots to relearn! :-)

[Reefland]

Well welcome back to the best hobby in the world, and Welcome to Reefland!

[apantale]

Thanks very much for the great input. I hate the idea of dropping 2 or potentially, 3 submersibles especially for my 35gal flatback hex. There would be alot of room being used for heat than for live rock and corals.. Oh well, its better to protect them more than anything else.

[middlemark]

Great post by Grim ... really happy to have you here

I've been considering this same topic, as I've heard too many stories of heat issues. Some sort of controller [would be nice to have 2-stage in case of chiller need, even just additional fans in there] ... just seems to be the way to go. For someone with multiple tanks like I have, though - it's either expensive or worrisome for at least some of my tanks.

That said, it's gotten to be on my `short list' of items I'm shopping for.

[Reefland]

I think it would be interesting if we had data on failure rate (failure being that the tank temp moves outside of a pre-determined range set by aquarist due to heater problems) to see if going to a controller was worth it based on failure probability. Food for thought I guess... I mean I have read horror stories about heaters failing either on or off and causing total losses, just wondering if the frequency warranted the expense.