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Read through some more horror stories from heater-failures today and it made me want to attempt a solution. I was thinking of using 15 or so feet of H2 PTFE Fluerotherm run into a cheap-insulated lunchbox or cooler (maybe just one of the cheap styrofoam boxes with a water-proof coating or bag inside) of around 1-2 gallon capacity which would house a 50-100gph pump and the heaters from the display. The line would then be run out to the rear-chamber of the display-tank and through a dozen or two feet of coiling, as you would see in a chiller, before returning to the reservoir to be re-heated. I see no reason why the material wouldn't be reef-safe (since it's food-safe and used to coat pans) and it's getting in the ballpark of having the same thermal-conductivity as some metals (while still being an inert electrical-insulator). I figure the relatively-small volume and flow-rate means that the tank wouldn't just be protected from shorts, but also from overheating - with the potential to actually probe the reservoir-itself to a kill-switch for redundancy. And since I only need to keep things around 6-10F above ambient I'm not exactly trying to boil things. My two main Ideas for operation would be: -Keep the reservoir hot, around 85+ F and run the pump on a temp-probe in the display, the downside to this of course is that it would react sluggishly and potentially-cause consistent, small temperature-swings. -The second idea is, if possible, to match the display-tank's goal-temp (75F) and run the pump 24/7 during the winter. If there is enough mass and energy being imparted into the system then I wouldn't have to worry about swings at all. The downside is that this method would likely need to approach the peak flow-rate for airline tubing (around 150 gph) and has the potential to underheat the system if the ambient temperature falls too low (in which case I could run my redundant heater on a probe and have it kick-in to further heat the reservoir's water). Any insane folks out there care to entertain my crazy ramblings for a second lol? Would love feedback, couldn't find too many folks trying to DIY heater-coils, just allot of chillers haha. And, while I could probably set up the math for mass-flow-rate --> heat transfer, it doesn't really take into account the liquid cooling in the system itself and is an absolute-headache, so I would probably go the trail-and-error route instead. @Wonderboy Your tanks are DIY haevens, what do you think?
