Yande
New Member
It all started in February, when we lost half of our fish during the bushfires here due to not having electricity at home for 14 days. We ended moving out to live in our shop, doing water changes when possible, but still no hot water. A month or so after that I bought a few fish from a pet shop and it was in March when I noticed a cornucopia of snails (yep, a mob of snails is called a cornucopia) in my 200 L tank. I also run a 50 l tank, but there are no snails in that one, only the tank that I had put the new fish in was infected. During a closer inspection I noticed that my heater was also broken, so I did some research and decided on buying a Fluval E Series 200w.
I purchased the heater online from a company called miscota.au, and it was not until AFTER I had paid that I was informed that my heater was coming from Spain, yes, Spain, at the height of the Pandamic! There was no mention of Spain before I paid. That was just what I did not want, for I understood the “.au”, to mean Australia. . I was not happy for I only had a 50w heater as a back up.
So, after taking 1 month to get from Spain to The Netherlands, the heater stayed there for a month, and finally arrived at my door last Friday. Great, a major cleanout of substrate, filter everything, hopefully to get rid of my snails. (They are not such a bother, but I wanted to get rid of them.). Due to a bad design on my part I have to take about 150 litres out of my tank to enable me to extract my SunSun (copy) filter, which I have run for around 5 years, I’ll fix that one day.
So I get everything cleaned, new substrate, some bacteria medium from my other tank, (extra I had been cultivating) and put it all together to find that my filter was tripping my power box. I panicked and installed a back up filter I had, later to realize that it was a broken UV light that was tripping the power, an easy fix once the UV light tube turns up.. My bad.
But hey, I got my Fluval E Series 200w heater in there, and it was Blue, 24C and heating, as it should be. Success! Or so I thought. So, all up that exercise took about 8 or more hours, with siphoning, cleaning, filter modifications, scratching my head etc., and one too many beers… That definitely did not help in my decision making I can tell you..
The next day the tank is cloudy, due to a temporary smaller filter system, and the heater was still showing Blue, and still at 24C, that is not good. I had it set to 26C. Pull out the bible, ie., “YouTube” and play around with the location of the heater, water flow and the heat of the house and get it set, and it is heating, and finally, it sits on 26C, the light is Green, perfect. Back to my novel I am reading, keeping a regular eye on my heater as I had been doing all day. Literally half an hour later and 24 hours after I first turned my heater on, it just went dead, I wouldn’t even say it switched off, it just went dead, and that is where it is today. My 3 year old $8 Chinese 50W heater is back in the tank, with a blanket over the top of it, and I am mightily not happy..
I have tried everything, but I cannot get any sign of life out of this heater. It was working, and then it wasn’t. As far as I can tell I did nothing to cause it to stop, as I had not even touched it for at least 2 hours before it stopped. All power equipment works except this heater.
Whilst this heater was in transit, at one time considered lost, I did enquire on Fluval Australia’s Facebook page where I could buy one and they answered…. “unfortunately there are no 200watt Fluval heaters, or any higher wattages in Australia.” Perhaps there is a reason for that? Though all I can find is on the Instructions which agrees with Australia being a 50Hz system and that is what they say they are shipped with if the default temp is C. Default temp was C when I initially turned it on.
I have made further enquiries with Fluval Australia but it is a long weekend here so I doubt I will hear back until next week. I just thought I would share my thoughts with you, check my thinking in the hope I would answer my problem. Any ideas?
I purchased the heater online from a company called miscota.au, and it was not until AFTER I had paid that I was informed that my heater was coming from Spain, yes, Spain, at the height of the Pandamic! There was no mention of Spain before I paid. That was just what I did not want, for I understood the “.au”, to mean Australia. . I was not happy for I only had a 50w heater as a back up.
So, after taking 1 month to get from Spain to The Netherlands, the heater stayed there for a month, and finally arrived at my door last Friday. Great, a major cleanout of substrate, filter everything, hopefully to get rid of my snails. (They are not such a bother, but I wanted to get rid of them.). Due to a bad design on my part I have to take about 150 litres out of my tank to enable me to extract my SunSun (copy) filter, which I have run for around 5 years, I’ll fix that one day.
So I get everything cleaned, new substrate, some bacteria medium from my other tank, (extra I had been cultivating) and put it all together to find that my filter was tripping my power box. I panicked and installed a back up filter I had, later to realize that it was a broken UV light that was tripping the power, an easy fix once the UV light tube turns up.. My bad.
But hey, I got my Fluval E Series 200w heater in there, and it was Blue, 24C and heating, as it should be. Success! Or so I thought. So, all up that exercise took about 8 or more hours, with siphoning, cleaning, filter modifications, scratching my head etc., and one too many beers… That definitely did not help in my decision making I can tell you..
The next day the tank is cloudy, due to a temporary smaller filter system, and the heater was still showing Blue, and still at 24C, that is not good. I had it set to 26C. Pull out the bible, ie., “YouTube” and play around with the location of the heater, water flow and the heat of the house and get it set, and it is heating, and finally, it sits on 26C, the light is Green, perfect. Back to my novel I am reading, keeping a regular eye on my heater as I had been doing all day. Literally half an hour later and 24 hours after I first turned my heater on, it just went dead, I wouldn’t even say it switched off, it just went dead, and that is where it is today. My 3 year old $8 Chinese 50W heater is back in the tank, with a blanket over the top of it, and I am mightily not happy..
I have tried everything, but I cannot get any sign of life out of this heater. It was working, and then it wasn’t. As far as I can tell I did nothing to cause it to stop, as I had not even touched it for at least 2 hours before it stopped. All power equipment works except this heater.
Whilst this heater was in transit, at one time considered lost, I did enquire on Fluval Australia’s Facebook page where I could buy one and they answered…. “unfortunately there are no 200watt Fluval heaters, or any higher wattages in Australia.” Perhaps there is a reason for that? Though all I can find is on the Instructions which agrees with Australia being a 50Hz system and that is what they say they are shipped with if the default temp is C. Default temp was C when I initially turned it on.
I have made further enquiries with Fluval Australia but it is a long weekend here so I doubt I will hear back until next week. I just thought I would share my thoughts with you, check my thinking in the hope I would answer my problem. Any ideas?
