highland135
New member
Thought I'd post a lesson learned. I had a lifegard digital thermometer, compliments of Daryl, that worked great until it fell into a bucket of water during a water change. I liked it so well I ordered a new one. Now that things have been getting cooler I found my heater wasn't working right either so I replaced it with a new titatium one that has the controller built onto the power cord so it doesn't sit in the tank. I noticed after a few hours my tank temp. seemed to have dropped to 71 degrees so I turned up the temp. A few hours later I had to turn it up again significantly so I assumed the markings of the temp on the dial was off. WRONG... I left for work and when I came back the Lifegard said the tank was 78 degrees. When I looked in the tank I had two dead cleaner shrimp, a dead scooter blenny, a dead orchid dotty back and my frogspawn is probably dead cause it was shriveled down to where I can see almost the whole plug it was fragged onto.
When I went to test the water I could feel it was like bath water and immediately used a floating thermometer. It read 87 degrees! The lifegard thermometer was about 6 1/2 degrees off and I basically boiled my tank. I was lucky my gobies, clown fish and one of my purple firefish survived. Lesson learned I guess is not assume new equipment is calibrated correctly until you check it with a known commodity!!
When I went to test the water I could feel it was like bath water and immediately used a floating thermometer. It read 87 degrees! The lifegard thermometer was about 6 1/2 degrees off and I basically boiled my tank. I was lucky my gobies, clown fish and one of my purple firefish survived. Lesson learned I guess is not assume new equipment is calibrated correctly until you check it with a known commodity!!
