Aquarium heaters and controllers

[JB33t]

Are these heaters BRS heaters any good in anyone’s experience. I’m setting up a 25g sps tank with a 10g sump and I would preferably have a finnex however the minimum (300w) is too big for my tank and I don’t wanna oversize on a heater. I’m going to purchase a ink bird controller for the heater does the ink bird act as a fail safe and automatically turn the heater off or does it just give an alarm to me?

 

[SPS2020]

One additional thing to consider...two heaters for redundancy and safety. Set the thermostat one degree colder on one than the other. In the event the main doesn't come on, the backup will.

 

[Water Dog]

Like I’ve noted in the thread that I linked to earlier, Ranco temperature controllers are built and designed for commercial / industrial applications. They‘re not hobby grade gear with hobby grade reliability like other offerings meant for aquarium use and have been known to last well over a decade.

 

[Soren]

i would suggest getting a heater with internal thermostat and add an external controller like ink bird on top of it. Heater failure can cause the tank to crash, and its always nice to have secondary fallback/insurance. There is practically no price different for the heater with thermostat or the one without.

Very interesting idea here. Double protection. Would anyone be willing to give a 2nd opinion on this idea?

That should work, although the main component on the heater itself that fails is the relay that connects or disconnects for the thermostatic control. A heater with internal thermostat has a relay that could fail, while a heater without internal thermostatic control has no internal relay and is theoretically more reliable. Either way, it is probably a good idea to replace heaters every year to avoid failure. The added control redundancy preventing failure stuck on is probably well worth the risk of wear on an extra relay.

Also, if you use a heater with internal thermostat, make sure to set the internal thermostat to a higher setting than on the external controller.

...also, +1 on heater redundancy with two or more heaters. This is exactly why I have two Ranco controllers, one for each heater. If set a couple degrees apart, the back-up should never be used until event of failure on the first (hopefully fails off), in which case the back-up provides heat until replacement of the first unit. You could run these cyclically by waiting for failure of the first before replacing, using the back-up as the new primary unit and replacing back-up with new unit, and so on, though this is running a slightly higher risk of failure than just replacing the heater.

With redundancy, failure off for the primary heater is not an issue, but failure on (for either heater) would still be an issue, so replacement often is the safest option.