so last night around 4 44 a.m. there was suddenly there's beep beep beep sound and my husband was
like what was that and i was like oh it's probably an aquarium alarm let me show you
I'm Irene with Girl Talks Fish here with practical tips for busy fish keepers like you and if you
didn't know already most of the aquarium fish that you get at your PetSmart/Petco, like
guppies and bettas they are not gonna do well at normal room temperatures that you're comfortable
with so for example imagine you as a human being being kept in 50°F weather all the time with no
extra clothes and let's see how long you last now because of my recent heater failure i gotta get a
new one so i figured let's talk about what do i look for how do i choose an aquarium heater
what do i do if they break and then what are some of my favorite brands to go with
so first off what size heater should you get now the typical rule of thumb is 5 watts per gallon
which means a 20 gallon aquarium would need a 100 watt heater however that is if you want to raise
the temperature by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit if you want to do it even more because you know let's
say your aquarium is in a really chilly office setting or if you are like me and live in Colorado
where we keep our house pretty cold the formula is actually 10 watts per gallon so for this 20 gallon
aquarium I'm actually going to get a 200 watt heater now you may think okay easy enough just get
a 200 watt heater actually tip number two is that it's better to have two heaters instead of one why
do you say that well if you've ever tried to buy a heater before and look on the Amazon.com reviews
like all of them fail haters just fail and most of the time they either when they fail
they just completely go cold so that means your fish are going to freeze to death or
they get too hot and your fish are going to cook now if i had two 100 watt heaters instead of one
200 watt heater did that make any sense I'm going to put them both on each ends of the aquarium and
let's say this one fails most likely both of them aren't going to fail the same time right so if
this one goes cold at least the other heater will still be able to keep the temperature relatively
warm and then if this one gets hot well at least it won't get as hot as a 200 watt heater would
have it will not do as much damage basically so having two heaters instead of one is kind of like
spreading out your risk tip number three is what heater features should i look at now for the
most part heaters are pretty simple um but some of them have gotten really complicated like they have
wi-fi connectivity they have low flow sensors you know all sorts of stuff i mainly want two
things i want it to be adjustable because you know that way if i want to keep um a
fish that needs cooler temperatures versus hotter temperatures i can just use the same heater and
then the second thing i kind of like is this i guess you could call it a heater guard or basket
um so that my fish won't ever get stuck next to the heater and i actually had an emerald green
corydoras get stuck between the wall of the tank and a heater and he passed away so i don't know if
it was because he was stuck or if like the heater burned him but just in case the heater guard is
kind of a nice thing to have category number four is installation so the first thing you do is when
you put your heater into the aquarium do not plug it in most of the instructions usually ask you to
wait about 20 to 30 minutes before plugging it in just so it can soak in the water acclimate it
acclimate to the temperature and then not have any breakage potentially from temperature shock
ideally you want to put this thing next to a filter like the filter output or a power head
and have good water circulation on it because if it's in a really stagnant area let's say that's
clogged up by plants there's a lot of hot water like hot spots that can form around the heater
and so you want that water current blowing the warm water to the rest of the aquarium
all the aquarium heaters i use are submersible meaning they should be
completely under water you do not want to run it dry otherwise it might crack or burn out and
that can be a problem during water changes you know imagine that water is going down below and
then this is actually a lot of the heaters have a minimum line that water needs to cover it if
it goes below that that's not good so i actually do turn off my heater during water changes however
that has run like I've run into a few problems where I've forgotten to turn it back on again so
recently i did splurge and buy a wi-fi timer and that way i can a just use my phone to turn off my
heater and i don't have to fumble around for the cable in the back and also it allows me to set a
timer so that I'll say okay in one and a half hours automatically turn on again if i forget
which is nice finally i like using a lid on all of my aquariums just because it tends to keep that
heat in there's less evaporative cooling and then that helps me save electricity in the long run
tip number five is just expect that your heater is gonna fail at some point now this
was problematic because i don't know about you but i don't really look at the temperature of my
aquarium very often i just assume it's working and yeah i need help basically so let's take a
look back at my story from the very beginning and this is how i knew my heater had failed
so you can see it's supposed to be 81 to about 77 degrees and my low alarm
is this top one and it's below 72 degrees and that's what went off so
now if you look at the heater itself um the green light is actually on
not the red light but the other reason why i like these controllers is because it has the alarm for
if the temperature gets too high or too low i definitely probably would not have noticed for
quite a while if this thing hadn't beeped in the middle of night so yep temperature controllers
can seem really extra but in this case it probably saved a lot of my fish's lives PSA done
another reason why i like temperature controllers is because Cory from Aquarium Co-Op has this
theory that the reason why heaters fail so often is because they're constantly having to cycle on
and off like imagine turning a light switch on and on and on on and off and off try to say that
five times fast um repeatedly you know eventually that switch is probably going to break faster than
if you just left it on or off for long periods of time and so same thing with our heaters every time
they go down by a degree half a degree or whatever it is they automatically have to kick off on and
then they kick off again and then kick on and so instead the temperature controller allows me to
set it so that this kicks on until it reaches 78°F and then it turns off until the water naturally
cools to 74 degrees which takes a while for even a 20 gallon aquarium and then it turns on again
and that means less power cycling for this heater and hopefully it'll last longer in the long run
if that sounds interesting to you I've got a whole video over here on temperature controllers
but if you're looking for a cheaper alternative uh i also use a lot of just digital thermometers
that have an alarm on it so it goes beeps when it's too high or the temperature is too low
just be aware they do have batteries that eventually run out so keep an eye on that
as for my favorite heaters i would say i mean in the past i basically only bought Aqueon Pros
but by now they have all burned out or stopped working on me so now i have some EHEIM ones
i have some Fluval heaters i even tried a little Hygger one for my baby brine shrimp
hatchery that it didn't quite work out for um and then eventually I'm sure you know if and when
Aquarium Co-Op makes heaters as well I'm gonna make sure i get my hands on those now if you are
dead set against getting an aquarium heater for some reason there are definitely animals that
you can get that will survive at room temperature so you can check out their care guides over here
take time to enjoy your aquariums and I'll see you in the next video