Electrical/Safety Considerations?

I'm planning on putting a 300 gallon tank on the 1st floor of my house against an exterior wall. I have a 4 foot crawlspace underneath the floor and plan on re-inforcing it with braces.

I'm also considering having an electrician come out and install a GFI and potentially another circuit and outlet.

So is it really necessary to have an electrician put in a GFI, or are the specialty surge proctectors sufficient?

If you had it to do over, how many electrical outlets/circuits would you install? Or am I making this a bigger deal than it needs to be? Would I ok running everything from a few powerstrips daisy chained off a couple of outlets?

Thanks!

 

personally, i like the idea of having a dedicated circuit just for the tank. with gfci's in all the receptacles. i also use surge protectors in conjunction with them all. id rather have overkill in regards to electricity than not enough. to me , minimum code is just that, the minimum , i like extra.

 

With the outlets, it really depends. As long as they are not shared with say the laundry room, kitchen, or any other high load breakers on the circuit you should be fine. I run my entire tank from a single wall outlet (well, two outlets, you get the point).
As for GFCI, you can just put it on the outlet. Surge protectors are NOT gfci's.

 

If money were no obstacle, I would have two separate 15 Amp circuits installed with separate GFCIs. Split your circulation pumps/powerheads between the two circuits. When one GFCI trips, and they eventually will, the other circuit will remain active and provide circulation to your tank. A 300G tank will require a good bit of power so 2 circuits would be best.

If money is an obstacle, then use an external power strip with GFCI. As PackLeader said, GFCIs is not the same thing as a surge protector.

Jack

 

As I planned my 300 gal, I went with 3 seperate 20amp circuits. I probably could get by with less but now I don't have to worry about overloading things. Another step that I took was to go with GFI breakers instead of GFI outlets. The Breakers are a little bit more expensive (may $25 ea instead of $12ea) but GFI breakers are more resistant to inappropriate tripping when a heavy darw item like a chiller or MH ballast fires up. It isn't a common occurance but there have been tanks devastated when the GFI circuit tripped and took the tanks skimmer and/or cirulation of line while the tank owner wasn't at home to notice.
BTW, I'm really glad that I engineered a little bit of overkill since my tank has grow to 550 gal (probably 750-800gal total system)

 

I like to use 2 circuits as well. That way if one blows, you still have water circulation.

Don't forget the drip loops too.

 

Thanks for the info guys. I was only planning on running 1 - 20amp. I think I'll reconsider and run 2 since I'm already running the wiring, one more isn't going to add much extra work.

GoToSleep -
Do you also run GFI outlets, or just the GFI breakers? Thanks for the info, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do and was even considering running both.