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Water Heater element and your fish health ...

After looking over a number of articles on this forum and the internet ... I was wondering why you couldn't use ... say a 4" PVC piece of pipe and a cap that will hold the hot water tank heating element centered on one end and a screw cap on the other.

Fill up the chamber with water and screw on the cap, waterproof and drop in fish tank. Plug in and heat the water inside the 4" PVC chamber. The residual heat would radiate out from the PVC pipe and heat your fish tank without exposing the fish to the heating element at all.

Does this sound like it could work? Just sayin' !

Bob

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Permalink Reply by Bob Vento on July 26, 2012 at 4:46am

Bradley,

Welcome to the ADVENTURES of aquaponics !

Bradly said:

Oh man....I had no idea. The element itself looks like stainless steel...maybe it is. I'll double check it.

If it is stainless steel then I should be good right?

Thanks Much Jim,Bob,Jon, and Vlad ...

Boy...isn't there any part of this that's easy ?? :-)

(And I haven't even cycled up the system yet) !!

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Permalink Reply by Bradly on July 26, 2012 at 11:43am

Bob

I know !!! :-)

Well, I'm a pitbull when I'm onto a project, I will suceed.... (no matter what the cost) :-) In for a penny...pound...blah blah! :-)

I already ordered a new stainless steel heating element ($40 more gone) and I'll rebuild the heater.

I thought about heating water inside like a s.steel bucket in the tank and let the heat kind of radiate out...but then I decided to do the right thing and spring for the stainless element plus shipping cost.

Oh well, the good news is that all my GBs are draining regularly with my bell siphons..... they're taking almost exactly 12 minutes for a complete cycle. I'm going to try to slow them down to the slowest they'll go this weekend. I'm also running water and slowly bringing my PH down...so I'm making progress !