Title: Heating room vs. tanks?
Pseudospecialops - August 6, 2007 10:10 PM (GMT)
How many gallons does one need to have in a 12x14 fish room (oh, yeah, and home office) before it's cheaper to heat the room than to have heaters in each tank?
Anyone got any ideas on how to calculate this?
preacherboy - August 6, 2007 10:17 PM (GMT)
Don, I don't have an answer for you, but
one question that might come to mind would
be what type of heat source/heating fuel are you
using? Hmmmm
Right now electric is cheaper than gas or propane. dumb dumb
Just a thought and cool question!
Are you thinking of building your own fish room? Wooo hoo!!
Pseudospecialops - August 7, 2007 01:36 AM (GMT)
I'd supplement the house natural gas heat with some kind of electrical heater to add a few degrees if I ever got enough gallonage.
Thing is, since it's also my home office it's probably never going to be practical for me to have enough tanks fit in there for it to make sense.
PGA - August 9, 2007 04:41 AM (GMT)
If you heat the room to heat the tanks, you would be heating everything in the room as well as the water. It would seem that if your goal was to heat the water, it would always be more efficient to heat the water directly rather than indirectly.
As long as you don't have some terribly inefficient water heaters, it may eventually become cheaper to heat the water only and allow the water to heat the room. It seems that there would be too much waste the other way around.
To figure it out, you'd need the specific heats of water and air to see how much energy is needed to change the temperature. Then I guess you would need the densities of each, since you know the volumes to figure out how much mass you have to heat. Then you can figure out how much energy would be needed to heat the water and the air. Then you need to figure out the cost of each unit of energy when directly heating the air and then again for directly heating the water and compare the two.
finman57 - August 15, 2007 02:43 PM (GMT)
Personally, I heat the fish room. It seems to me that there is less evaporation when doing this. Plus one electric heater for the room is cheeper than buying 50 tank heaters. I have a digital heater that sits on the floor. It even has a remote.(guy thing). It just seemed that I was always having problems with the heaters in the tanks and paying for more every year. I still run a couple of heaters on the bottom row for certain fish but over all am satisfied with heating the room. I also run a dehumidifier in the room and that throws out a bunch of heat too.
Just what I do. Not what you should do.