Weird Heater issue

nzafi

Goliath Tigerfish
MFK Member
Mar 14, 2008
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So I woke up the other day and heard the alarm on my heater controller beeping and make a weird clicking nose. The controller was jumping to high setup to another random temperature and back like it was shorting. My setup was a finnex 800w titanium heater with a finnex controller both about 3 months old.

Looks like the issue was the heater. I was able to run the controller with two other heaters without a problem and the beeping which is why I think its the heater. Also, if I plugged the heater directly into the wall and used the controller for the temperature the controller would start making the noise which made me think the heater was "leaking" low voltage or something into the tank (fish have not died which is what is weird to me).

After back and forth with Finnex and not being happy with their support I just bought two brand new ebo jager heaters to connect to the controller. They are working like a charm for now.

However, the weirdest thing happened. I did a water change on Sunday where I use a python connect to a bathroom near my tanks. While doing this, the controller started going nuts on my. When I pulled the syphon out of the tank everything was fine.

WTF is going on? Right now the heaters and tanks are running great but no idea what caused this.
 

DDK

Plecostomus
MFK Member
May 25, 2013
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Seems like the heater controller is bugged, I would get rid of it for now and run the heaters into outlets and not the timer. New heaters have a remarkably small failure rate. After the first year, second year third year, its a ticking time bomb but new heaters failing within the first year is pretty unheard of.

If your running two, chances are if one is stuck on the on position it cant overheat the tank (depending on tank size) so I would just run the heaters to a outlet. Chances of both new heaters being stuck on the on position are SLIM.
 

nzafi

Goliath Tigerfish
MFK Member
Mar 14, 2008
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I don't think its the controller. I have two different controllers both of which are just a couple months old. Both controllers started making the noise when I put the syphon into the tanks. These are completely separate tanks. I find it unlikely that two controllers that are that new can be doing this.
 

nzafi

Goliath Tigerfish
MFK Member
Mar 14, 2008
2,177
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I'll reach out to Finnex again but I was not impressed with their initial customer service response.
 
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