Heater Malfunction

I can't believe it! I've had one of my tanks running smoothly for a year or so - guess I was due for a fall. A couple of nights ago, I was heading for bed and just glanced over at the tank. I got into the bedroom before what I had seen sank in. I turned around and went back for a look and sure enough, my thermometer was reading just a hair under 90. My fish were all acting pretty lethargic and the cories were nowhere to be found. I pulled the heater out and started trying to bring the temp down. I dropped ice packs in, scooped water out and added room temperature water. Within an hour, I had temp back down under 80 and the danios, tetras, and otos were swimming around. I was sure the cories were gone, but two showed up the next morning. The other two never did put in an appearance and I'm pretty sure now that they didn't make it.

I have since replaced the heater. The old heater went into the garbage. I decided it wasn't worth keeping after trying it in a sink full of water and in just a few hours, it was hot enough to scald.

heaters do malfunction i have been lucky over the yrs and havent had that problem...If you just want to keep the water in the lower 70s you can buy a heater thats undersized for your aquarium and that way if it malfuntions then it might not heat the water to extreme temps....

Linda I am so glad you notice and was able to save your babies.!!!!!

Sassy, I don't know why I glanced at the thermometer but I'm glad I did. And although I hate that I lost a couple of my cories, I'm so glad that they're all I lost.

Wblueus, I didn't think of downsizing the heater. Hopefully, going with a better quality one will work for me.

I've had $40 heaters fry my fish - as well as $8 (ebay) heaters just stop working. To this day I haven't found a direct correlation between a more expensive model being more dependable than a cheap one. In fact, in all three of my living room tanks I'm using various ebay steals and have had no problems.

However, I did recently purchase three techno heaters - none of which worked for longer than a week. But the Techno just quit heating and didn't kill anything. Not like the Stealths which fried two different 55G on two different occasions. Ordered a few different cheapy ebay brands to replace them - tell you what I think of them after I get them and try them out for a month.

Its amazing to see two friends of mine with cheap Walmart heaters they hadn't used in years - set back up and have no problems with the crusted old things... Gotta laugh at the irony sometimes.

Geez, and I thought better quality would equate to better performance. Shows what I know! On the other hand, I'm glad it wasn't just because I was using a cheap piece of stuff.

I've had great luck with wal mart heaters (all glass brand) lol the worst heater ive ever had was tetra brand