89 Degrees

So i came home yesterday to find my tank at 89 degrees F. All my corals were shriveled up and the fish were very active. The only thing I can figure out is my three week old Marineland Stealth heater (newest model) failed me. The green light was on but the temp was of course, ridiculous. So I went to the freezer and grabbed all the ice cubes I could find and dumped them into the sump and let the nitrate spike be damned. That immediately dropped the temp which was great. I got it down to 83 within 2-3 hour and it is now at 78 today. Everything is back to normal but the pom pom xenia but I am sure it will be fine as well. I am going to put my old smaller but trusty Marineland stealth unit (ten years old) back for now.

Scary experience.

 

r u sure ur thermostat is correct also which kind of thermostat do u use

 

Of course. It is built in. I always set them to 78.

 

Heater thermostats are notorious for failing on like I believe you probably experienced. I would look at getting a controller to control the heaters. You can get a ReefKeeper Lite for like $100 I think and you shouldn't have to worry about that as much.

 

Those built in thermostats often times fail or suck out of the box.

 

Did you bag them or just throw them in? If you threw them in without being in a bag, check your salinity as the freshwater will lower your salinity.

 

For future reference, instead of worrying about a bunch of melting ice in your tank, what I do is I have two two-liter bottles filled with water that I keep in my freezer... they're basically giant ice cubes that don't leak in to the tank when they melt. If I ever have a temp spike, I just float one or both of them in the water for a while and the temp goes back down. Then you can just re-freeze them again too.

Hope this helps, and I feel your pain about the heaters, mine sucks as well.

 

Not to discount the ice tricky entirely, that's an effective way to drop the temp, but that only helps if you're home when it happens and you happen to notice the tank is hot. Lots of damage can be done overnight or while you're at work etc.

That's another benefit to a controller, you can put a fan on the thermostat to turn on iff the water gets too hot because of ambient room temperature etc.

 

Or at least get a heater with an external thermostat. Its worth paying more for a good quality heater for the piece of mind.

 

Thank you guys. I should have threw them in a freezer bag, good point. I will be buying a temperature controller here shortly!