Insulating an aquarium for the winter months

[cvar]

I agree. It's likely far cheaper to insulate the whole basement. Total of 1000W heaters for 180 days at 25 cents/Kw-hr will cost $1080. Yikes! But heaters usually cycle on/off rather than providing heat 100% of the time, so running half-time would cost half that.

Some years ago, we found that insulating our whole basement with about $300 of fiberglass pink (back then) more than paid for itself during the 1st winter alone (avg. $4K/yr electric bill), and it also made the upstairs feel more comfy. Sealing all the little air leaks (gaps, cracks, etc.) with expanding foam worked wonders, stopping cold drafts.

FWIW, ConEd sometimes offered to subsidize cost of energy saving stuff, and did an energy audit for us, so they helped show us what/where to fix. Do they still do that?

Would this help?: http://www.mge.com/home/basements.htm

 

[Dan F]

Insulating your tanks will get you a lot more energy savings for your dollar. Even if you did a really good job of insulating the basement, it still will use a lot of energy to heat it to 78-80 degrees. Of course it will help to insulate the basement, but heating the whole space will invariably use more power than heating just the tanks.

I keep a couple large tanks in my insulated but unheated garage. In the winter it gets down to close to freezing, but I get by with only around 3W/gallon of heat by insulating all but one side of the tanks. I use a combination of foam-board insulation and aluminized "bubble-wrap" type insulation. I have a few pieces that I take off in summer and the rest stays year-round. It also helps a lot to insulate any external filters as well.

 

[DaveB]

Oh I wasn't suggesting heat the basement so much that he wouldn't have to heat the tanks at all... only to heat it to whatever it's at normally so the heaters in the tank didn't have to work overtime.

I've never really thought about what the cost of running my tanks is... I used to live in a really expensive inefficient place even without any tanks... now our same size place with 5 tanks running costs 1/4 what that place cost with 0. At this point I feel like I'm playing with house money. But putting it in simple terms like cvar did makes me want to do some experimenting...