Calcualting the power consumption of an Aquarium Heater....

[Mastiffman]

I'm going to be building a solar array and windmill generator system to support my aquariums somewhat to lower our energy bill and was curious if any of you knew the best way to calculate how much actual Watts per hour that the average aqurium heater uses obviously based off of the rated wattage...?

 

[Coel03]

No idea but I'm going to subscribe to this to follow. This is an awesome idea.


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[Gill Blue]

http://www.amazon.com/Arbor-Scienti...TF8&qid=1341600397&sr=8-3&keywords=kil+a+watt
as far as I know there's no regulatory board for fish stuff. I'd buy this and then you can test everything you own.

 

[Inglorious]

+1 on the kill-a-watt meter

 

[F1 VET]

I'm going to be building a solar array and windmill generator system to support my aquariums somewhat to lower our energy bill and was curious if any of you knew the best way to calculate how much actual Watts per hour that the average aqurium heater uses obviously based off of the rated wattage...?

It would also depend on ur air temp, like how many times it goes on too compensate for change, I'd say you'll need to buy a converter and it should be fine for just a heater but that depends on the output of ur solar or wind setup, not to mention tank size and displacement!

Go S. Vettel #1 rb8

 

[marv1]

Watts aren't sufficient to measure your power consumption. Watts are multiplied by hours and/or fractions of an hour to come up with watt hours.so you got to figure out the amps and how long will the heater be on to heat up the tank.... so ex....5amps x 120volt= 600watts x 8hrs(hours us in a day)= 4800watthours

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[marv1]

A 300w heater is 2.5 ams,400w is 3.33 amps

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[Oughtsix]

A 100watt heater should put out 100watts of heat while it is on. The efficiency of an electric heater is extremely high. Multiply the heater rating by the number of hours per day the heater is switched on.


Converting sunlight into electricity then into heat sounds like an inefficient and expensive system.

Have you considered some sort of solar hot water heating system? You would probably need some sort of storage tank to store the hot water until it is needed to heat the tanks.

 

[bbortko]

Have you priced the equipment yet? A few years ago I installed a bunch of small 6 panel systems(dont remember the specs) and they were $5,000 just for material and probably wouldnt be enough to power your tanks on there own. The panels were pole mounted so you'll save money if you have a structure to mount the to and the inverters had a small computer built in so that you can connect it to a PC via a cat5 cable and monitor the system which im sure was extra. Bottom line is you're probably looking at a 4-5year break even point.