Kessil

Very Puzzling Thing Came Up - Any Ideas?: Stray Voltage

ofzakaria said:
I think 25v will STN his coral and prevent him from having a healthy fish.

I remember once, Rob from neptune had huge coral loss from a 20 or 25v from a broken heater..you can ask him about it and he will tell u how harmful 25v is..
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It’s more like 28-30 volts. Plugged it into a grounded outlet as someone recommended and it dropped to 7 volts. Still too many? Is the goal here 0?
 
GabeB said:
It’s more like 28-30 volts. Plugged it into a grounded outlet as someone recommended and it dropped to 7 volts. Still too many? Is the goal here 0?
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I think if its real and not reading error u need to fix its
Not something thsy must be fixed immediately. But not something u sleep on.

Acceptable is in milli volt. 7 is way better than 30v. But still u want it go to sub 1v if possible.
 
Ok thank you. I would like to include my coral have been looking worse this week. I thought it was because I was a week behind on my water change but it seems like this may have been the culprit. I’m gonna try to isolate the voltage while grounded now and see if i can find the 7 volt source
 
xcaret said:
Check this video...
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Yeah that exact concept (same as like a bird landing on a power line) was why I was thinking this may not be an actual issue. As long as there's no path to ground there should be no current, however I am not sure if it is somehow grounding else where that I am unaware of which would then mean there's a current flowing through the tank which would definitely be an issue.
 
A person can become one with the force and no one has to be a Jedi/Sith.
Electricity searches for the closest/shortest point to the ground; the aquarium is just a part of that path to the ground.
 
Would anyone be willing to test the voltage in their tank for me if they have a multimeter? Curious what everyone is sitting at. I just put the red lead into my sump and the black on my ground and read the AC Voltage. I unplugged the heaters and dropped to 2.1 volts which was about 5 volts from the heaters. I have 2 300W Cobalt Neo-therms and would prefer not to replace them if unnecessary because they're not that cheap.
 
xcaret said:
Remove piece by piece of equipment while at the same time having a volt meter; one probe in the water column and the other to a ground source.
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Yeah that's what I'm working on right now. Unplugging my pump actually raises the voltage reading... any idea why?
 
I have a meter you can borrow, in SF.
But if the heaters are the suspects of that; might become a matter of time before they release all 120v in there. If the heating element goes bad, all those amps will look for a way out...
 
I have a meter, I just want to compare my reading to other people's readings to see if a normal tank is actually sitting at 0 or <1 volts. Unplugging my heaters drops me 5 volts so down to 2.2 volts while grounded.
 
GabeB said:
Yeah that exact concept (same as like a bird landing on a power line) was why I was thinking this may not be an actual issue. As long as there's no path to ground there should be no current, however I am not sure if it is somehow grounding else where that I am unaware of which would then mean there's a current flowing through the tank which would definitely be an issue.
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With no path to ground, there’s no circuit; there’s current but the circuit is open.
 
xcaret said:
I read you have all Kessil; by any chance, do you have any goosenecks and the metal piece happens to contact the water?
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I have 4 of their metal brackets and all are partially submerged in the water. Just unplugged all the lights and reading only dropped from 2V to 1.8V.
 
I think I found a culprit. One of my sensors on my ATK, quite odd. When I unplug one of sensors the reading drops from 2V to 1V which is more of a major drop than I've seen from anything else. I was getting some weird readings last week so that's why I checked it.
 
Where I'm at right now. Grounded outlet: 7 volts

In this order...

Unplug heaters: 2V
Unplug optical sensor: 1V
Unplug skimmer: .6V
Unplug all lights: .2V
Unplug apex probes (red and blue): 0V

Seems like culprit is mainly the heaters. If someone could check their stray voltage I'd really appreciate it and then I'll decide where to go from there. Thanks!
 
GabeB said:
Seems like culprit is mainly the heaters. If someone could check their stray voltage I'd really appreciate it and then I'll decide where to go from there. Thanks!
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I only use a voltage tester "pen" to test my tank, which I believe goes off if it senses any voltage above 0. The tank stays voltage free according to the pen, but I did put a grounding probe in there anyway for extra safety
 
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