Tank temperatures and power savings?

[danlu_gt]

I've been reading a lot of discussion about MH vs LED power saving and additional power saving from heat or lack there of.  I'm curious to what temp do you all keep your fish room and temp for the tank itself?  All my tanks are plumbed together and I have about 450gal of total water volume.  Now that it's colder, I set my house heater temp at 69F at night and my tank heaters haven't kicked in yet.  I set my tank heaters to turn on if tank temp drops below 76F.  My tanks are glass with all open top and sump is acrylic.    I can't image needing to turn on the tank heater ever in the summer time.  Maybe my return pumps are heating up my tanks.

When I use to set my tank temperature to steady 79F, my tank heaters will turn on a lot.  Then if we have a warmer day, my cooling fans will kick in at 79.5F.  I found it a waste of energy heating up my tanks at night and just to cool it during the day.  Whenever I get some corals and fishes online, sometimes they came in at 68F and as cold as 65F before.  They all seems to make it ok with short term colder temp.  After visiting Hawaii and I noticed how there's could be big temp difference from wave to wave when snorkeling, I decided to let my tank temp swing from 76F to 79.5F.  Now my tank heaters hardly need to turn on. 

Anyone have long term experience of running tanks at cooler temp during the winter months?

[SuncrestReef]

I keep my tank at 78.0 +/- 0.3 degrees.  I'm sure a lot of people will say that it's not necessary to keep the range so tight, but that's what I do.  The Apex takes care of it for me, so I just let it do its job.  I have two heaters in my sump for redundancy, and a 18" pedestal fan for cooling the tank if needed.

My house thermostat is set to 72 during the day and 65 at night.  I think my UV light running 24/7 might contribute a bit to heating the tank, but I really don't know how much.

[obrien.david.j]

I run my tank set at 76.9 +/- 0.1 degrees, apex controls it all.   But my situation is different.  My equipment room is in the non-temp controlled garage.   Occasionally, it gets cold enough that 500W of heater isn't enough, so I have a second stage heater set to fire if the first stage can't control.   This one runs often during really cold winter nights.  You can see it twice in the past week, both events happened due to 10 gallons of water change happened, with cooler water.

 

Tank Temp, vs dual stage heaters.  (blue is normal heater, black is "extra cold, 2nd stage" heater)

 

Tank temp, vs ambient temp in the garage fish room. (Tmp2nd)

[pdxmonkeyboy]

If your heaters are never on then how are you heating your tank?   I find it really hard to believe that a heater from a pump is heating 450 gallons of water 9 degrees...  That just doesn't make sense from a laws of physics sense. 

When I had a tank... I had a total water volume of about 400 gallons.  I keep my tank at 78.5.  The sump was in the basement and I had two refugiums and a frag tank.  I had 1,100 watts of heaters and they cycled on and off throughout the night.  Almost like clockwork really but I keep my house pretty cool.  Our thermostat is set to 65 or something in the winter until 11:00 then it drops to 60 until 4pm the next day.  

Suncrest.. can you overlay your heater on/off your temp graph?  

Daniel, do you have a temp graph?  

 

[SuncrestReef]

29 minutes ago, pdxmonkeyboy said:

Suncrest.. can you overlay your heater on/off your temp graph?  

Here's the past 24 hours with the heater (in blue) and fan (in black) overlays:

 

[danlu_gt]

1 hour ago, pdxmonkeyboy said:

If your heaters are never on then how are you heating your tank?   I find it really hard to believe that a heater from a pump is heating 450 gallons of water 9 degrees...  That just doesn't make sense from a laws of physics sense. 

When I had a tank... I had a total water volume of about 400 gallons.  I keep my tank at 78.5.  The sump was in the basement and I had two refugiums and a frag tank.  I had 1,100 watts of heaters and they cycled on and off throughout the night.  Almost like clockwork really but I keep my house pretty cool.  Our thermostat is set to 65 or something in the winter until 11:00 then it drops to 60 until 4pm the next day.  

Suncrest.. can you overlay your heater on/off your temp graph?  

Daniel, do you have a temp graph?  

 

 

I'm heating my tank by my love.  haha

I did type "return pumps" and not "a pump"...  I have 4 return pumps (2 jebao 12000, 1 jebao 8000, and 1 jebao 4000) that get water back to 4 tanks and to the ATS.  I also have 6 wave pumps spread out over 4 tanks.  I think my ATS lights heat up the water a bit as well since the lights press against the ATS box, and the ATS is a closed acrylic box to help keep it quiet.  My controller only turns the heater on if temp drops below 75.8F and heater is off when temp is above 76.2F.  Yesterday we got some sun and my house temp went up to 73F during the day, and tank temp was 78.2F when I looked.

I don't have a graph at the moment.  I'm re-coding my controller and porting it to the new microcontroller and new wifi module.  I'll probably have the SQL logging ported over later tonight and should start logging data to my server.  

[pdxmonkeyboy]

1 hour ago, danlu_gt said:

I don't have a graph at the moment.  I'm re-coding my controller and porting it to the new microcontroller and new wifi module.  I'll probably have the SQL logging ported over later tonight and should start logging data to my server.  

Ummmmm, ok?    Four return pumps though.. ballin!  I saw a build thread yesterday and the guy had 17... yes SEVENTEEN Mp40's.    I'm like... brah.. build a closed loop LOL.  17 mp40's.. someone must have hit the scratch off lottery. 

[danlu_gt]

12 hours ago, pdxmonkeyboy said:

Ummmmm, ok?    Four return pumps though.. ballin!  I saw a build thread yesterday and the guy had 17... yes SEVENTEEN Mp40's.    I'm like... brah.. build a closed loop LOL.  17 mp40's.. someone must have hit the scratch off lottery. 

Was that guy the engineer for the MP40's?  He probably just had a few pallet loads of MP40 sitting in his garage.

Got the SQL logging ported over to the new controller.  Here's 3 data set for testing.  It should start auto logging every 10mins.

[kilmca]

Seems to me that my heater is on quite a bit especially when it starts cooling down outside.  House thermostat is set at 70 from 7 am to 9 pm and 65 at night.  I would have it cooler during the day but my inlaws live with us and they are home most of the time so it needs to be warmer...or at least that's what my wife says.  I have a 1000 watt heater and it keeps the tanks between 77 and 78.  

 

  

[danlu_gt]

Here are my logging info from last night.  Temp drops slowly but haven't cross the 76F threshold.  As the day time house temp goes up, tank temp creeps up.  I guess as we get colder daytime weather, tank heater will kick in.  We have the house night temp set higher at 69F and daytime at 70F.  When I had the tank temp at 78F before, yes the tank heater is on very frequent, but drop the tank min temp to 76F, then tank heater hardly turns on.

[pdxmonkeyboy]

How does your PH stay so stable between night and day?  Or maybe this is just a daytime reading?  Your x axis is unintelligible on my phone.  😞

 

[danlu_gt]

48 minutes ago, pdxmonkeyboy said:

How does your PH stay so stable between night and day?  Or maybe this is just a daytime reading?  Your x axis is unintelligible on my phone.  😞

 

I only got the SQL logging to work again at 2am on 10/24/2019.  So the graph only had 10hrs of data.  Here's more data set with 1.5 days worth.  Got some weird pH drops last night.. I think that's when I unplug the pH probe last night when I was testing an idea during my insomnia.  I think my pH is some what stable because I'm running ATS lights at 20hrs duration to fight dino outbreak.