Its time to check your heating system

[Jeremy Brito]

This morning i woke up to frost on the ground and a chill in the air. This is by far my favorite time of year, the smell of wood burning from fire places in the air among-st other autumn smells like leaves and corn fields rotting (if you live by them you know what i mean). The weather is cool but not to cold you don't need Air conditioning but you don't quite need heat yet and you can have the windows open most of the day with out getting choked by the New Jersey humidity.

As fire fighter this is the time of year we put out warnings to home owners to make sure they have proper working smoke and carbon dioxide detectors in their homes and to make sure that there heating systems have been inspected and cleaned for approaching cold weather. The reason for these warnings is because this is also the time of year we get the most house fires and carbon monoxide poisoning calls due to people turning on there heating system for the first time since the previous winter only to find a bird has built a nest in there chimney or that their exhaust and furnace should have been cleaned 2 years ago and these sorta things lead to major unsafe conditions.

As much as i want you all to be safe this isn't the reason for title of the post. Today i came home from work at noon to find a strange faint beeping noise that i had never heard before coming from some place in my home, after searching most the rooms i finally tracked the source of the beeping to my tank or more accurately the Digital Aquatics Reef Keeper Lite that i got a while back from another club member named mike.

Now i have owned the controller for about a year and half and up until this day never knew it makes noise or better yet that it has an alarm feature. So your probably guessing now that the Alarm on my Reef Keeper has to do with the Temperature or heating system that i have in my tank, and you would be right. When i first installed the Reef Keeper i set it up to act as a temperature controller a fail safe in case the built in thermostat on the two heaters decided not to work and its secondary function was to control the lighting on the tank. For the temperature controller feature the Reef Keeper has a probe that sits in the tank and monitors the temperature, it can then use the data provided by the probe to control the outlets the heaters are in. When the water is above 79.9 degrees the outlet shuts down preventing the heater from turning on, and when its below 78.6 degrees the outlet is active.
'
Aside from just shutting down the out lets on the power strip the Reef keeper also has a audible and visual alarm set up to custom parameters, in this case when the temperature dropped below 75 degrees an audible and flashing alarm activated to alert me that there was something wrong that something being the tank was to cold. In the event it was the opposite the system would have sent an alarm when the water temperature broke 80 degrees. on side note if the reef keeper has a wifi module hooked up it would have sent a alert message to my email along with all the other alarms.

So as it turns out during the summer when the heaters were probably rarely running if at all the thermostat inside one of them failed, it sorta still works just basically believes the temperature is warmer or shuts it self off prior to reaching the desired temperature, If this were something you could calibrate it would be deemed out of calibration. The tank temperature dropped to 70.00 degrees probably dipping into the 60s at one point. thankfully i was able to crank both heater ups to there highest setting and slowly get the water temperature up yo 78 again over a period of 5 hours or so. The heaters will now only function based on the Reef Keepers reading how ever being that the reef keeper is now the only fail safe and the probe it uses does require calibration, it is in my best interest to replace the heaters so that there is always a second back up should one fail.

The lesson learned here is simple check your equipment and make sure its properly functioning. The heaters are probably the pieces of equipment i look at the least, originally i just set the thermostat and placed them in the tank and never touched them again, it was only by the fact that I was gifted the Reef Keeper that i was lucky enough to have a fail safe system and had it not been for that system i could have lost alot. Now just because are climate control equipment has thermostats does not mean they are 100 percent accurate all the time, it is best when checking to make sure they are functioning properly that you have multiple sources to check and recheck the temperature. Having more then one reading will better the odds that you are accurate, if you have two readings theres a 50/50 chance one is accurate if you have 3 readings now you have the ability to assess a pattern and or obtain an average. In others words if 2 of the 3 say 78 and one says 76 you know that its more likely to have 2 accurate readings that are the same then 2 broken or un-calibrated thermometers. The more sources you have the better, in the case of 3 or more readings that are all slightly different you would look for the average or the 2 closest readings to base your likely calibrated temp to.

Another means of calibration which is a little more costly would be to by a temperature calibrating thermometer, a cheap one is around 15 to 20 dollars. Just remember the cheaper you go the quality goes down.

So when you guys get a chance take a look at your heating systems and make sure they are all working like they should and then make sure your alarm systems are functioning properly as well. BOTH IN YOUR HOUSE AND IN YOUR TANK

 

[Jeremy Brito]

A couple things i forgot to add

First are just somethings to consider,
Tank temperature sings are one of the most common system failures and can be the most costly aside from things like ATO failures.

your tanks can typically stand colder temperature longer then hot but that does not mean that the cold does not come at a cost. cold water typically hold oxygenation better then warm or hot water which is considered a plus but cold water has a lot of hidden negatives.

When the temperature in the tank drops one of the first things that occurs is the inhabitants of the tank start to become sluggish, this is a defense mechanism to help them conserve energy. It is much more taxing on a fish or invert to produce the energy needed to keep warm then it is to regulate at normal temperatures because this there metabolism slows, they appetite decreases and they will hunker down in the areas that remain the warmest if possible.

Because they are not eating their immune systems weaken, and just like use a weak immune system can lead to getting sick. Fish get colds to guys, though there illnesses tend to become systematic much quicker and have a higher mortality rate.

Another thing that happens in a cold tank is the beneficial bacteria start to hibernate and thus stop produce new bacteria which breaks down the tanks first line of defense when comes to pollutants which is problem, because in cold water pollutants tend to collect and preserve, in the begging these pollutants do not cause alarm, they remain low in the water colloum and unless stirred up some times dont show up accurately on the test kits we use. over time they will build the biggest problem with this is when the water finally warms and the pollutants start to break down and contaminate the water, you get explosive result poisoning the tank much quicker then your average build up in a tank maintained at a stable temperature. All this combined with the weakened fish and the slower diminished bacteria lead to major break down in the nitrogen cycle.

In warm water, the oxygen depletes quicker and fish cant regulate temperature especially higher temperatures for long, they have no means of escaping the heat they dont have clothing to take off and they cant sweat the combination of this will literally cause your fish to try and jump out of the tank to survive.

Fish being stressed from over heating tend to remain near the surface rapidly swimming back and fourth in the first stages, then gulping for air and thrashing about or flashing and jumping out of the water until finally they go belly up.

its important we know the signs of environmental stress like temperature regulation because it is usually the first indicator we recognize when we figure out there is a problem.

Lastly i mentioned previously about checking you heaters and i forget to mention that the best technique for doing this would be to remove heater from the tank and place it in a room temperature 5 gallon bucket of SALT water, i stress salt because salt and fresh have different properties and thus retain and lose heat slightly differently. You can use fresh it just i feel its better to make sure that the heaters are checked against the environment they are kept.

Heat the water in the bucket to the desired temp, let say 78 degrees, in 5 gallon bucket the water should warm up quickly. Check to make sure the heater turns on and turns off properly it should do this automatically for most heaters. Check the water temperature with a separate thermometer and confirm that the temperature which the water reached at the time the heater was no active was the temperature the thermostat was set to, check this reading with multiple thermometers to ensure accuracy. if the readings are different then the thermostat its best to assume the thermostat is wrong and that the reading you got was the actual temperature that thermostat is miss reading.

Use this knowledge to adjust your heaters accordingly, keeping in mind that the temperature on the thermostat gauge is misrepresented Ie. thermostat gauge states its set to 76 how ever it actually heats up to 78 at this setting prior to shutting off.