Fish room - Heat the tanks or the room or both.

I apolgies in advance if this topic has come up before in the distant past, but I did check and could not really find any specific topic on this, other than the very technical and indepth work that I know @f-fish has done on this topic. (BTW thanks for sharing all your work on this topic @f-fish, I find the technical stuff very interesting!)

So I am sure that most of you with MTS or a fish room must have noticed how the electricity cost are really starting to play a huge negative factor in this fantastic hobby. This is the first year I am noticing a significant increase use in electricity this winter so far. (We switched to prepaid 6 years ago and have never looked back, no more nasty run-inns with CoJ)

Now my fish room is tiny and has grown a bit in size in the number of tanks and the total heater wattage now is up to 300w total on all the small tanks and 500w total on the big tanks, to total now is 800w. Granted they dont all run at the same time, however in winter they are all definetly switching on when required to compared to summer when they hardly come on at all.

The room is well insulated and is actually just below ground level and so maintains a constant temp of around 21 to 23 degrees throughout the year. The room is also so small it is very easy to heat with 1x400w panel heater. All my tanks are also covered with the ugly looking black fiberglass or cheap plastic covers what ever it is that they are made out of. (Thats going tp change very soon)

All lighting is LED and all the heaters are matched in wattage to the size of their respective tanks.

The rest of the filters and main airpump are negligible in terms of power use and add up to a total of around 110 watts.

So I was just wondering what other members are doing and coming up with in terms of marking your fish room or in the case of tanks scattered all over the house, your fish house in that case, be more energy effecient and still be able to properly make sure your fish are kept at the correct temperatures that they can tolerate, with out making the already fat cats at eishkom even fatter.

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Heater not working properly?

I bubble-wrap the tanks xD

 

Everyone I know using prepaid (myself included), whether keeping fish or not has noticed a considerable increase in power consumption since 1 June. Eskom announced as of 1 June winter pricing kicks in; this is only supposed to affect industrial customers but I can't fathom how my consumption can jump by 30% all of a sudden. Has anyone else experienced such a big change?
https://ewn.co.za/2019/06/17/eskom-says-winter-plan-has-resulted-in-low-risk-of-load-shedding

Most fish can survive quite cold temperatures as long as the change is gradual. One of my tanks was down to 16 degrees yesterday when I got home and noticed the heater was off The knife fish and bichir were all fine. I heated it back up slowly. Was 22 this morning.

Been playing with the idea of pre-heating sump water through solar...

 

Even though my heaters are set at 24°C, the nights get colder and water temperatures drop.
I have started using an oil heater in the fish room during the night, and it helps.
Temperatures are near enough constant to not be very noticeable.

Consumption certainly goes up in the winter.
I try and breed shrimp and fish throughout the year, and with the colder temperatures breeding slows down if the temperatures aren't kept constant.

 

If you want to pull a sneaky, then swing the day night cycle ... this means that the heat form the lights heat the room in winter at night. This works great if you have no natural light into the room. I assume your room is actually all sorted ... make an automatic door closer - this saves loads if somebody . thing keeps swinging the door open.

If you can not measure it you can not fix it.






2/3'rd of our consumption is hobby related ... so I stopped trying to make the rest of the house more power efficient.



Typical power consumption for the entire room - 16 tanks around a 3x4m room bad insulation - plate glass etc. Lights on before 6 off around 15:00 .. heaters are the peeks.


Room temp is still above 14 just .. ;-)


I could up the avg room temp by 1 degree by doubling the amount of tanks with heaters to 4 out of the 16 ... but we only have another month or so left so lets let it be for now ..

When it gets really cold - I have an emergency light cycle that starts way early - this has not kicked in this year yet.

Later Ferdie

 

Fantastic info. Love your posts!