Just an idea I had

Hi fsb72,
I've just joined having been busy setting up an aquaponics system. I've got 100 murray cod fingerlings and will need live food for them. Suddenly now, I'm looking more closely at freshwater aquaria and am hooked. I'll be setting up tanks over the next twelve months and will need to solar heat water through the colder months (April-Aug - south eastern Australia). Eventually I'll have to heat 5000 litres. I'm keen to see what you do.
If you get out of Melbourne and want to visit and offer advice, we're in Elmore, north of Bendigo.
murraycod
 
sounds all right. I'm going to test it out this summer so post all the data than
all of the bugs need to iron out than.

I'm going to use a two foot tank with a one foot sump and one foot run off tank that will
loop back to the sump.
 
If you used a closed loop setup with a heat exchanger, you wouldn't need as large a pump.

For the thermostat, you'd also want two of them and some sort of logical AND gate...i.e. if the temperature in the tank is less than 78 AND the temp of the water in the heating loop is greater than 80, the pump turns on. Otherwise it stays off, if only one or neither of the conditions is satisfied. Easy to do with two relays in series controlled by the thermostats.

There was a guy on RC who did something very similar except used the loop as a chiller for his reef tank. He had a copper coil sitting on a lake bottom (the house was on a lakefront) with a heat exchanger inside with a titanium coil in his sump.
 
Thanks Matt.I'll take all that in to account mate you've been a great help!!!
 
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