Lowering the energy bill: Heat the room or the tank

[Blaise006]

Cover the tank with glass lids. Helps a lot with heat retention

I’ve been considering it. Can’t find any great solutions yet.

 

[Coral reefer]

I’ve been considering it. Can’t find any great solutions yet.

Glass shop

 

[rygh]

Wouldn’t you expect that to be a consistent issue rather than a single event?

A hot garage and cold air outside could affect the way it vents.
Inversion layer kind of thing.
I get your idea of manufacturing residue, but it should have smelled, and been long done by now.

 

[iani]

View attachment 33379
I love that idea but I don’t have any easy/cheap way to connect the house and garage heating wise.

How does the water heater under the garage get to the house?

 

[sfsuphysics]

So the problem I have is that I could run a 1500 watt heater to heat the small 200 sq Ft garage. Or run two separate systems in that space (frag and DT) for close to 1700 watts. Those systems would never be connected and there will be an additional load when ever the QT tank is running.

You're comparing watts but you're assuming those watts will be on for the same amount of time, so you can't just say "this has less watts" if your space heater is on 20 hours a day, and the aquarium heaters (1700 watts?) are on just 8 hours a day the space heater will cost you 2.2x the cost. If the whole tank is 1700 rated watts worth of stuff, you need to break that down, water pumps will run 24 hours a day, lights will be half that or even less, heaters will heat based on how much energy gets dumped to the environment.

Is it smarter to heat the space or the tanks individually and from most the replies it seems keep heating the tanks even though it’s using about 10 kilowatts already and the big DT doesn’t even have water in it yet.

Average daily use is 40 kilowatts. San Jose survey says average use is ~13kilwatts per day per random internet search. Apex says I’m using 7-9 kilowatts just to heat the frag tank.

I'm assuming you mean kWh (kilowatt hours) and not kW (kilo watt). How cold is the garage normally? If it's pushing mid 50s and you're trying to keep a block o' water in the high 70s then yeah you're going to spinning that electric meter much more so than the average person. If that value was the average winter month, it may very well be a case of no A/C being used, and electrical may be natural gas (i.e. doesn't show up as electrical usage) or the weather is fine and doesn't require any energy to deal with.