twomonsters

I live in Clinton ia. its -11 here with the wind chill -42 so far my tank is holding at 78.3 and everything is doing fine and I have my heater set at 79..the second heater should help if not might want to aquire another if possible.

While I'm in Texas, we have too had the cold weather snap hit our area. My tank dipped to 77.6° F this morning, which is unusual. Normally the tank's heaters kick on at 77.9° F. I checked the sump and two of the three heaters were running, but the third one flicked on right before my eyes. I didn't do anything about it since I'd already bumped up the house heat a couple more degrees, and the metal halides were going to come on in a few hours.

Definitely good advice, twomonsters. Thanks for the timely reminder.

I found out one of my heaters is not working when the tank got to 72.5! (I need to set up alerts on my apex). The garage heater was not able to deal with single digit temperature that Charlotte had two days ago. I stuck in a small heater to help, it is on the rise. Ordered two new 300 watt heaters which should be here by Friday, one will be a spare.

Make sure your circuit isn't overloaded with the extra heater(s), or it may trip creating new issues.

Only have two working heaters plugged into apex at the moment. Each EB is plugged into a different 20 amp dedicated circuit for the tank.

Here is a great site for calculating the necessary wattage for tank heat:

http://www.kernsanalysis.com/HeaterCalculator.cgi

The only problem is that the model doesn't work for tanks without a glass top, which is what most of us have. Still, it's a great tool. If I put .05" for top thickness (the calculator won't accept "0" for top thickness, and numbers too much lower than .05 begin to give unrealistic wattages) 19 degrees F for temp delta, and measurements of my 60g cube (along with wall thickness and material) it tells me that it recommends a 303W heater, and that's "with" a .05" thick glass top to retain additional heat. If you have multiple tanks (or sumps) you can do each one individually and add up the wattage for a rough estimate. If you use that method, be sure to use the "break even" wattage, not the recommended wattage for each one. Then add a safety margin to that number.

I found out that I needed a much larger heater than I thought, but then again I do keep my house a 62 during the day when I'm gone. Cheaper to heat the reef than the whole house when its single digits outside!

That seems like a lot of heat, Aquarius Marinus. But I believe most people don't keep their homes 62° F daily. (Last night, I was feeling pretty cold and yet my house was 73° F.) The average rule of heat required in the U.S. seems to be 3 watts per gallon. With your link above, it suggested 5w per gallon. Not an outrageous number, but still potent enough to cook a tank if it stuck in the On position. If you are running 300w of heat, I hope you installed two 150w heaters. One won't have the juice to overheat the water, which is an excellent precaution.

That is an excellent precaution. I haven't started my 60 cube yet, so I will be sure to split it across two heaters. When it is empty (of livestock...not water.....) I should try two 100W heaters and see if it can keep up with my 62 degree house. I have suffered losses from heat before (as you can see from my blog yesterday) so I want to be sure to take every precaution possible against that.