Heating Fish Room

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Candiru
MFK Member
Oct 22, 2007
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Canada
I have about 1300 Gallons in the basement, with another 1500 coming online in a couple months.

I heat with forced air electric/wood in the winter, and thus heating the tanks can get quite costly.

Someone mentioned using a portable space heater, sealed with oil, with an electric element.

Is this the most efficient way, or do others have any better ideas?

I was going to use a wood stove, but the heat generated from this is very inconsistent.
 
The dry heat from a wood stove might help control humidity too.
 
The wood stove works great, and is dirt cheap, only problem is that it runs through my duct work, and thus I cannot heat the basement termperature to 77^ F without sweating myself out of the house.

I would like to heat up the fish room as a whole, and wonder if it would be more efficient to heat with these oil space heaters, than to heat the water.

Yes - Humidity is an issue. I have an Air exchanger, plus 3 dehumidifiers right now....
 
No, i think he said ductwork. But if it is hot water heat, you could run a coil of it in your sumps, and connect that coil to a circulating pump. have the circulating pump run off of a thermostate in the tank, and you should be golden. Another option might be to fabricate some kind of heat exchanger for your stove, and heat the tanks that way. You can go to alot of websites where people talk about this, just search for wood stove forums or something similar.
 
kzimmerman;2992282; said:
No, i think he said ductwork. But if it is hot water heat, you could run a coil of it in your sumps, and connect that coil to a circulating pump. have the circulating pump run off of a thermostate in the tank, and you should be golden. Another option might be to fabricate some kind of heat exchanger for your stove, and heat the tanks that way. You can go to alot of websites where people talk about this, just search for wood stove forums or something similar.
Click to expand...

Yes - wood furnace feeds the heat through duct work into the house. Funny you talk about the coil / recurculating pump idea. I thought this was a wacky idea, and hoped for something easier, though I agree with you, might work very well. I was thinking of running copper pipe around the stack (pipe exiting the wood furnace) and run this back to my tanks ( I am running them on 3 central systems).

The one concern I had was, if the fire goes out (example: 3:00AM) will the recirculating water get chilled somehow? Or would I be able to somehow have this also switched so that when the stack temperature falls under 77^F, it stops recirculating?

For summer time, do you think it would be worth coming up with a solution? or would simple space heaters not consume much energy in the summer months?)

For summer, I had thought of the idea of Solar heat (panel on top of the roof, running a coil into the 3 central systems), but unsure if the savings would really amount to anything significant.

Thank you for your thoughts,
 
Heating the Room will cut down on the humidity big time. When the water temp is higher than your air temp you get a lot of evaporation. When the air and water temp are the same it drastically cuts down on evaporation. So by heating the room you can get rid of the Dehumidifiers and add the electric heaters and you might see a small increase or decrease in your electric bill depending on how the heaters and dehumidifiers offset each other.
 
Could you not put a "valve" in the duct work? Close off most to the rest of the house and heat the basement. As far as 3am..have a backup in the tank/sump.
 
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