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Re: re heating cables
> I have found that the cheapest and one of the easiest ways to heat the
> plants from the bottom is not from heating cables, but rather to pump heated
> water through some tubbing and have that burried in the gravel. I have a
> tank that has been up for over a year and my plants do well with this
> radiator method. I wonder how many other people out there have done
> something like this. You can tap right into the pump that you use for
> filtration.
David,
I've set up my planted tank with a very similar system. I put an old UG
plate covered with a 1/2" foam layer under the substrate. The foam is to
prevent the fine-grained laterite/sand/crushed vermiculite mix at the
bottom layer of the substrate to clog the plate slits. I divert water
from the output of the canister filter through a drip irrigation
mini-faucet into the UG plate riser tube. This setup is basically a
very simple gravity-fed pump. Water flows into the raiser tube at a
rate of about 5-10 gal/day. There is no supplemental heating of this
water, so the system just keeps the substrate at the same temperature
of the tank. The tank stand has a full suporting surface, not just the
edge frame, so the tank's base glass is relatively well insulated from
room temperature. It wouldn't be difficult to heat the substrate water
provided a *very* low-power submersible heater could be found and put
inside the riser tube. The tank is about 7 months old and doing well.
It remains to be seen if this system will help the long term stability.
Anyway, it was so inexpensive to assemble that I thought it was worth
a try.
Btw, shouldn't such mechanism prevent, or at least delay, the development
of foul substances that may eventually cloud the water, as explained by
Cathy Hartland in her recent post ? With a substate circulation system
most of the substrate material is continuously exposed to "new" water.
-Ivo Busko
Baltimore, MD