Setting up a large in-wall system (~ 1000G of water total) and planning to have 3-4 separate heaters but am forgetting and cannot find the recommended Watts per Gallon to determine what size heaters I should buy. Perhaps related: all but 1/4 of the display tank will be in a dedicated sump room which will be kept a constant 75 degrees by a dedicated room AC/heater. Thanks, Steve.
Watts per Gallon for Heaters?
- Thread starter Steve175
- Start date
jkeating2005
New member
i have always known to to go with 3-5 watts per gallon!
luther1200
Premium Member
+1 3-5 watts per gallon
Or.. There's always the old faithfull " watch the lights" method.. Put in two heaters.. if the lights are always on.. add another one. When the lights go off every now and then, you know that you are at the threshold of them keeping up.. Even if one sticks "on" it won't have the capacity to overheat the tank... the other ones won't kick in.. redundancy and simplicity in one shot!
The problem with this is you aren't taking into consideration dwell time. As an example, I have a 300g display, 40g of water in my sump, 60g in a fuge, 25g in a frag tank. The flow through my sump is about 1900gph, so I needed to use two 800w heaters to sufficiently heat the water. If the flow was, say half that, I could probably use one heater or two smaller ones.
