Reef nutrition

Heater broke...what to do?

DurTBear

DurTBear

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Looks like one or both of my heaters broke. Came home to a very strong, electric burning smell in my condo. One of the heaters (glass one) seemed to be smoking periodically while the other heater (non-glass) seemed to be bubbling periodically. My Apex shows a spike in amps and 2 degree spike in temperature this afternoon at 4:30p and 6pm.

All of my coral had shrunk (i.e. anemone's were small and tentacles deflated, frogspawn tentacles were completely inside the stem, etc.). I believe something has leaked into my aquarium because the water also smells strongly of the burning smell. So I immediately did a 20% water change and plan to do another 20% water change shortly. Any other advice? I hope my tank doesn't drop temp too much overnight until I can go to the LFS and buy another heater. At least it's warm tonight so it should be fine.

Really worried about the health of my tank with this breakdown... argh...

Anyone have any good heater suggestions? Are Eheim Jager's favored by other club members?
 
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add carbon and polyfilter ( for heavy metals detection) to your water/filter. I don't run a heater but the temp stays around 73 in the room. You should do waters changes until the smell is gone and corals open up again. You need to find out why they broke...low water level or something?
 
Oh yeah. Carbon. Thanks for reminding me of that.

And yes it's bizarre that they both crapped out at the same time. I have everything plugged into a GFCI outlet so hopefully that would protect against surges, etc.
 
Poly Filter is something every reefer should have handy. They're come in a sealed bag, and are very effective at absorbing some nasties (and changing color to let you kind of nasties).

Carbon is another thing that is useful to run as well, although not quite as effective. IIRC Poly Filters use a similar technology to the filters used in dialysis machines.
 
As to the spike in amps, could be the heater had a short, which allowed current to run more unimpeded through it, at which time it got hotter and raised the temp as well before finally burning out (expensive electrical smell). Depending how close your temperature probe is to your heater could get higher than normal temperature readings.
 
I really like the Aqueon Pro heater since they are entirely made out of plastic and very reliable. They're really long though. The basic titanium heating tubes hooked up to an external heater controller are nice and reliable too, like the Finnex ones.
 
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