Jake’s Planted Aquarium Pages

Heating is probably the easiest thing to take care of. If you run a canister filter or external water pump of some kind, you can use an external inline heater, such as the kind Hydor makes. They are by far my favorite filter for a 40+ gallon tank. Otherwise you can use the more typical submersible heaters. There are many kinds and many brands, but some of your better submersible heaters are Ebo Jagers, which unfortunately are now Eheim Jagers. Eheim is usually a beacon of quality, but I’d find someone with an old stock of Ebo jagers before buying just the “jagers”. Plenty of people still sell Ebo Jagers online. Many different people will give you many different brand names, but with those Hydor inline heaters and Ebo Jagers if you want a submersible, you can heat about anything you want for years and years. Everything else I’ve used dies or malfunctions inevitably. Titanium heaters are also becoming popular. Many of them are just steel heaters that are called ” titanium” but the idea is the same. It won’t crack underwater and shock you, you don’t have to stick your hands in the tank to change the temperature, (external thermostat), and it functions as a “grounding rod” which will help to funnel any stray current from your lights and other gear out of the tank. Buying a grounding rod / probe just buy itself costs about as much as these heaters!

How many watts do you need?

People usually give a general rule of thumb of 5 watts worth of heater for every gallon of water. To me, that’s crazy high for a general rule. That’d be ok if your room temperature was 18F and you wanted a 78F tank, but most of us have a 70-72F room temperature and only need to bump up the temperature a few degrees. I heat my 75 gallon tank with a 200W external heater! That’s almost half of what is recommended, but then the room it’s in stays 72-74F year round and I have it set to just 78F. I would go with a more liberal rule of thumb of 3-5 watts of heater per gallon in a glass tank and probably 2-3 watts per gallon in an acrylic tank. An acrylic tank is better insulated than glass and should hold heat at least a little bit better.
The main point I would like you to get from this section is to not put all of your eggs in one basket. If you have a 55 gallon tank and want to use submersible heaters to heat it, don’t use a single 300W heater. If you feel you really need 300W to keep your tank up to temperature, use two 150W heaters and place them near the outflow, (water return), of your filter or powerheads so that the water is pushed by them and the temperature in your tank is more even. If one quits, the other will buy you enough time to go to the store or whatever and pick up another one. If one gets stuck in the “ON” position somehow, maybe it won’t have enough juice to cook your fish.

Where do I put the submersible heaters?

Anywhere you can hide them where the water will flow by it. If using a canister filter, you can put a heater near where the intake for the filter is, because water is being sucked up by it so therefore has to go past the heater before it can do so. Also, you can put one near the outflow of the canister filter, so that as it is returning water to the tank it flows over or past the heater. Anything that is in your tank and has water going into it and water moving out of it ( creating water flow) is a good candidate for getting a heater stuck near it. This keeps a more constant and even temperature throughout the tank. You don’t have that problem with the external inline heaters because water is sucked out of the tank and through the heater itself before being returned to the tank. In that instance, the water in the tank has no choice but to be heated.

Safety

Most important thing is to have ground circuit fault interrupters, or GCFI’s , to plug your equipment into. You’re messing around in your tank and break the glass heater. I’m sorry, but you’re not so fast you can get your hands out of there before getting the jolt of your life. GCFI’s could potentially save your butt. If you have proper drip loops in the cords of your equipment, ( a way of looping the cord so water cannot drip down and follow the cord to the plug-in), that’s a good start too, but a GCFI can help with that as well. There is NO SUBSTITUITE for a drip loop though… prevention being the best cure.

Other good heater- related safety can be unplugging the heater when changing water so it’s not out of the water. If you don’t do this and let it stay out of water “ON”, when you fill the tank back up it can shatter or crack the glass of the heater. You stick your hand in the tank and ” WHAM!!” On that same token, always give a heater time to adjust to different temperature water. When first putting a new heater in a tank or making very large water changes or even moving the heater to another tank, always give the heater time to adjust before turning it on. Also, don’t be like me and almost every other hobbyist out there… remember to plug the heater back in after water changes in a timely manner!

Anything else?

Heater cables/substrate heaters… what can I say except I have seen absolutely no concrete proof that they help in a planted tank. The idea is, you bury these cables in the substrate and they heat the substrate, which produces small currents that the roots of plants are supposed to like for nutritional and whatever else reasons. Try them if you want, but I’m not wasting spending my money on that. I’ll put it on my list of stuff to buy when someone actually proves it helps in any way.

Also, I can not stress this enough. DO NOT USE CHEAP HEATERS! It doesn’t make any sense to spend a lot of money on fish and plants and put it in the hands of a 6 dollar clamp-on-tank heater. You know the ones I’m talking about… the kind that aren’t even water proof. Also, pretty much any kind you can buy at a department store in the fish section is best left right there. Do not skimp on the heater.  One more time, and say it with me. DO NOT SKIMP ON THE HEATER!