need help choosing a heater

[sarmo]

Hi all, and thanks for the help in advance. i have a 500 gallon display with about 300 gallons in fuge, sump and frag tank. like most people i had heat issues but have solved that problem (kind of).
i was away on vacation and the weather turned cold. this resulted in a 10 degree drop in my system temp. i had some RTN and some browning of my SPS.
i have a controller that i can use but i need a better heater. i'd like something other than a "glass tube" and it doesn't need a thermostat.
any suggestions?

thanks,
rob

 

[monotreme_man]

even though i only have 250gal of water, i need a fair bit of heating
(about 1200W in mid-winter). i was tempted to get a couple of
500W titanium heaters but that would have needed a controller
up front. i ended up with six 250w visitherm stealth heaters.
the redundancy is nice, and they are cheap. note the redundancy
is twofold: the temp control restricts runaway hot, and the number
of heaters protects against (hot or cold) failure of any one or two heaters.

 

[sarmo]

thanks, i like the double redundancy, that is a great idea. do you find it hard to set the temp on each of the heaters to match or do they have staggered temps?
is the outer case of the visotherm plastic? or?

 

[monotreme_man]

the stealth heaters are plastic.

right now, i have them set to my desired temp (80F).
if i had a controller (set to 80F), i would set them to 82F.

 

[serpentman]

I've had issues using the stealth heaters. Within about 6mos they began leaking current like mad. I am using several 300w titanium heaters made by Sunlight Supply (Aquacave carries them). I like having multiple lower watt heaters for redundancy. If one goes out of wack it won't do too much damage.

I strongly suggest if you are going with multiple heaters you use a temp controller.

 

[monotreme_man]

how did you measure the current they leaked?