One Tank To Rule Them All

[Kulasik]

I know this may be a kind of off the wall idea but if your using that much energy in electric heaters might you try to tie it into your hot water heater for your house?

use a small circulation pump with an external thermometer and control unit to regulate the flow of water, whether it be fish water out of the tank or closed loop heating water

you might even be able to run it off of the pilot light

yes I am an engineer and unfortunately my brain never shuts off
Colin

[Ron]

I know this may be a kind of off the wall idea but if your using that much energy in electric heaters might you try to tie it into your hot water heater for your house?

use a small circulation pump with an external thermometer and control unit to regulate the flow of water, whether it be fish water out of the tank or closed loop heating water

you might even be able to run it off of the pilot light

yes I am an engineer and unfortunately my brain never shuts off
Colin

Thanks for the idea. I'd briefly considered something like that, but I wanted to run a loop to a copper coil within my wood furnace to provide hot water. The problem is that both the water heater and the furnace are on the opposite side of the basement. The walls are finished, the ceiling is finished, and the joists run perpendicular to the direction of travel needed for the piping. It'd either need a huge overhaul to hide the lines, or leave them exposed, ugly, and beyond that I'm curious what kind of heat loss would result.

[Kulasik]

These 300w heaters are long and take up a lot of space in the sump:

[/quote]

if you are passing the water across the heater(s) shouldnt you be able to cut down on the number of heaters or watts? up to a point of course

[Ron]

if you are passing the water across the heater(s) shouldnt you be able to cut down on the number of heaters or watts? up to a point of course

Thanks for the feedback. Passing water across the heaters allow them to most efficiently heat the tank (if the water was stagnant, the heaters would heat the water near themselves above the target temperature while the other reaches of the tank (presumably where the temperature sensor is) would take much longer to rise to the target temperature.

There is ~3600gph passing through that sump space. It has anywhere from 50-100 gallons, so there's plenty of turnover through the areas in which the heaters reside.

I actually had a bout with ich about 1-2 years ago and found the limitations of the heaters shown in the pictures. To raise the temperature high enough, I actually added another 550W of heaters at that time. These days I'm running 4 300W heaters in the sump. Using the heater controller, they are all synchronized to turn on and off in unison.

[Steve]

Just thought I would bump this and see how the monster tank has been doing lately Ron?

[Ron]

Everything has been going well. No issues other than the pothos don't really grow like I'd hoped. Recently they are starting to pick up a little now that the roots have a bit more protection from the clown loaches. I added a pair of fossies (around 5.5" - smallest in the tank) and a T. macrostoma male (7") I'm hoping will color up in time.

I do want to redo the filtration setup so it's easier to use filter socks for mechanical filtration with 100% pass through. I picked up some stuff to work on this, but haven't spent the time to start on it yet. I kind of have an idea of what I want to do, but won't know how it really works until I get going with it. I'll post an update when it gets changed eventually.

[Rob S]

Hey Ron! How about a new pic of this monster tank?

[Steve]

Anything new in the tank Ron? Always enjoy seeing updates on the monster.

[Ron]

Yeah, I need to get some pictures up sometime. I switched it all around to a new group of haps. Still have some buccos and fryeri, but also have some C. moorii, new Copadichromis, Mylochromis, ... a little different than before.

[Gorackk]

Didn't read all the post so if im repeating something about lighting sorry about that. You can do a led diy using 8' of gutters(vinyl) 2 pieces of 8' long 1"pvc, chrome tape and led light strip off of ebay amazon etc, for about 80 bucks.Oh thats as long as you not doing plants.

[Ron]

Enjoy this thread's pictures while they last. Photobucket just notified me that they detected 3rd party hosting via my account and want me to pay $400 per year () per their new policy if I want to keep this feature enabled. 

[danotaylor]

They're already gone mate 

[Ron]

They're already gone mate 

LOL - Maybe I prompted that to happen by posting. Sad to see.

[Regalblue]

Boo!!