JHB - time to check the heaters

True .

 

Nice thread going. Checked the fish room this morning all unheated tanks stable at 20/21 with 8 outside. Think it helps a lot that it is a room in a flat. Only 2 tanks don't have glass lids. Door closed when not in the room and 1 small window slightly open to get rid of moist air.

Do you use any form of moisture absorber or only prevent evaporation in your fish room?

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I find that I have to - my cube evaporates far too fast now that I have an heater in so I'm thinking of getting a lid for it.

 

I also started replacing my heaters with jager. It's burning a hole in my pocket haha.

 

Yeah look these are old - think it was like R180 for a 300w - but that was many many moons ago.

 

Seems winter is here.
I have 1 tank that due to space constraints stands in front of a partially open window.
Last night the temperature was sitting at 24.5°C, and this morning it had dropped to 20.1°C.
The heater is running almost permanently trying to get the temperature back to 26°C.

 

Yeah it is - mine was at 16 this morning before I switched everything back on (power was acting up last night due to the snow weather). Eish freaking cold here.

 

I have one fish tank in front of a window too due to constrained space and I'm covering it with a blanket at night to keep the heat up

 

@f-fish what controller are you using? I'm replacing because of a few failures I had, I don't trust the cheap stuff anymore.

 

Your reading my mind @BoelderBeestie ? He he .. yeah I am actually not using any controllers on the heaters, but since I had a few alarms go off when I added the extra 1500Watt that happened to be heating tanks while the kettle was running things spiked. So that got me thinking - I do not want eskom to auto load shed me just because I am now adding heaters if they ever decide to do avg consumption management. I would also like it if I can do things a bit more intelligent .. If I want a tank to be at say 19 degrees avg and it is 19 degrees in the fishroom but I do a water top-up without preheating the water then do I really want the heater to come on to take the 18.3 tank back to 19 degrees ... answer is no, right. So I do need to ignore the calibration and just look at using them as the heating element not the controller.

I have some bits lying around, I can probably rig two relays - two db18b20 probes ( maybe a 3'rd for ambient) and an esp8266 and call that my controller - the logic to get the stuff working is not that hard. I just need to get it done.

Later Ferdie

 

Have not got the 300watt guys connected yet - so this is just for 150+150+200 watt



Once can see the heaters working harder at night ... but maybe they really do not need since the intelligence is lacking - they work on fixed points right.



Now plot those power spikes against room temperature - you can see why they are working harder after 18:00

I am thinking of just how complex do I need these controllers to be - and I am going back to my original reason for running automation ( yes other than because I can ;-). Hey it was nice not having to worry about a thing in the fishroom for 4 weeks because it was being monitored and the other 1/4 had simple things to do if manual action was needed.
But here it is again ... The heavy lifting of logic needs to happen on the domoticz PI setup - so logic for ambient tempt vs time to daylight room temp blah blah blah all that needs to go on that platform.

The controllers need to be somewhat independent of domoticz - but only on the outside parameters. So for the lights I have safe guards on the controllers - lights must be off by 3 different set times at night and must be on by a certain time during the day. But those check points have nothing to do with the actual desired lighting period - they are to protect things from me leaving the lights on that I manually override if I want night pics or if domoticz looses the plot - and these work really well.

For the heating I need to the same thinking 1) The heaters will still be set to a max temp say 22 degrees - I.e. I never want to run a heater higher than 22 degrees irrelevant of what the logic says from the switch gear. 2) The actual relay and temp sensor will have parameters .. no matter what domoticz thinks a tank maybe never be lower than say 17 degrees or higher than 21.5 (temp probe is way more accurate than the internal switching ) 3) Normal switching will be based on trying to keep the tanks at say 18.5 degrees but now I can build logic that will go - nah you OK if it drops to 18 and it is 05:30 and the ambient temp in the room is busy climbing - then lets wait and see if we are still dropping below 18 degrees or something like that.

@Ladysphinx 100% best thing you can do on single tanks are blankets ... I even did it to my outside tanks moons ago https://www.tropicalaquarium.co.za/threads/blanket-over-tank.977/#post-11019

 

You make it sound so easy. Now for some of us that are technology wize in the stone age. I intend to heat up my fish room with a 300W pannel heater to get to a constant 24 degrees. Where can I start searching for a thermostat which might work for this? Reason I want to heat the room and not the tanks might work in 2 ways. 1st to keep the tanks at a constant temp and 2nd to prevent humidity going up when the ambient temp goes down.

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Panel heating works very well did it way back when I still had a gym room - ha ha ha that was such a funny idea right.

Off the shelf thermo switches might be tricky ... let me go dig see what I can find locally for you. Plug and Pray I assume ;-)

Truth be told - this is the first year that I am confident on monitoring the fishrooms power consumption .. so what I want to do is get things going with the normal heaters .. then maybe switch add a panel into the room, actually think I still have it somewhere.

Your point 2 is a big big big advantage ... hmm I can track that - ok maybe I need to move the panel experiment up a bit. 24 degrees if very high for me I am very happy at 18 - fish do not complain either.


Done - need to add the AC now.

For now I am just re-using the sonoff basic (Pierre - they do have plug and pray stuff that might work for you https://www.itead.cc/smart-home/sonoff-th.html communica sometimes stock it and it has a app that works well - you do not need to do the custom stuff that I am playing with)

Later Ferdie

 

Thanks Ferdie that was what I was looking for. My DIY skilles on electricity is defnitly not up there with yours, you might have noted the unsightly wires in my fish room. So plug and play is 100% down my ally.

The room heating idee came from your graph showing temp and humidity and it will be a lot cheeper heating the room and not 19 tanks. Lowest temp on a tank so far was 18 this morning. Will have to monitor the room temp from now on as well.

Sorry for highjacking your thread constantly. Will start my own on the fish room.

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Lol plug n pray. Those were the old days of computers

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ha ha - lets not have a show and tell, I am more practical than driven by aesthetics, much to the dismay of the other 1/4.



Gave the probes some time ... seems to have reach a probably value, good thing I can "calibrate" this also. Might just dump this down to a single temp sensor.

Later Ferdie

PS could not find a panel heater for lover or money in Cresta ... weird did find some infra red bar thing that claims it is 80% more cost effective than a gas heater ... but I am not keen on switching 1000W with out some sort of storage method.

Must say I have wondered just how much heat one can get from a pilot light that burns 24x7 on say a 9kg LPG and just how long that could burn - weeks / months ?

Later Ferdie

 

I have heating panels - got two on one from Makro on special. My only issue is that after a year, one is cracked. Its a common issue with these panels and it does get hot but my place is bigger than a bedroom and only one on the wall. Tiles also dont help as its still cold in there

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Here it is





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Yeah that looks familiar - I also thing they have a preset auto off or something like that.

 

Mine doesnt. You got a switch on the side to turn on or off. It was like 2 years ago, can't remember all the details.

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