Has anyone had any experience with the following aquarium heaters?

www.aquacave.com/detail.aspx?ID=368

no but i think i may order one. thats perfect for what i need and i wont have to hook up 3 small ones to do the same thing.

a 1000 watts????
The energy company is gonna send you some flowers, if you get that beast!lol

I will test it if anyone wants to buy me one.)))) looks like a tasty bit of kit. are you looking to buy one?

Yes, I am looking at buying 2 actually. In all, my whole system probably holds around 330 gallons of water, maybe slightly more. If the calculations are correct, I will need in excess of 1500 W to heat this amount of water efficiently. Now I've been thinking about this in the last couple of days, surely it's more efficient to have a little bit more heating than you need, rather than not quite enough? Think about it in a different way, if you have a large room heated by an electric fire on a thermostat. If that fire is only small it's going to have to work overtime to heat the room, which means it will be on all the time. However, if the fire is much larger then it will heat the room more efficiently and only come on when the temperature of the room drops below what you have to thermostat set to.

Now correct me if I'm wrong but an aquarium heater should work in exactly the same way. Yes, 1000 W is a hell of a lot if it's on all the time, but if I go slightly overboard with the heating then they should only come on intermittently. Also, I think you would heat the water more efficiently if you put the heaters in the main body of water, rather than the sump where the water is constantly moving.

OFL wrote:


My thoughts exactly.

I agree

That is only one snag, they do not sell these heaters in the UK. However if I wire the money to Nikki she will buy the heaters on my behalf and send them to me. Unfortunately there is still something else to consider. The USA is on 110 V, whereas the UK is on 230 V. You can get step up power supplies that are made for running appliances with a lower voltage in the UK, I'm just hoping that these heaters will work okay this way. Don't suppose we've got any electrical engineers on here who could confirm this for me?

ill have bent take a look when he gets home
his dad is a retired electrician

Sounds good, will be interested to hear what he has to say

hi ofl just spoke 2 a sparky he says u need some sort of transformer to reg the voltage if that makes any sense

Yep. like this

www.solotechnic.co.uk/stepdown-voltage-c...120v-45w-i24220.html