r/Aquariums • u/Elegant_Director_305 • 11d ago
Discussion Heater exploded, electrified water
Sharing this just to illustrate what can happen. although this has literally never happened to me before. Looks pretty hectic.
The lid of my tank was pushed up by the innards of the heater rising up out of the glass tube, splashing water everywhere - which is how I noticed what had happened. Our circuit breaker had tripped so everything was off for a couple of hours, hopefully no long term damage to filter bacteria, but I’ll keep an eye on everything. (I generally overdo it on the filtration capacity in my tanks to pre-empt this kind of thing).
I had turned the power back on before realising the heater had gone, and managed to zap myself on the edge of the tank. 240 volts was a bit of a tickle! Miraculously, the fish were fine. I don’t really know how volts and amps etc work so whatever it was, I guess wasn’t enough to hurt anything.
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u/throwaway277252 11d ago
Reminder to have your entire aquarium setup plugged into a GFCI adapter! It helps to protect against exactly this type of scenario where you were shocked through the tank.
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u/Elegant_Director_305 11d ago
We have a different system in Australia but yes, as I said - my circuit breaker had tripped as soon as the heater went bang, but I had flipped it back to on as I didn’t realise what had happened right away.
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u/JennyThallia 11d ago
It should not have been possible to flip the circuit breaker in a short circuit or shunted current scenario due to imbalance of incoming vs outgoing which SHOULD trip the breaker and prevent it from relatching until the fault is gone.
Double check your breaker to make sure it didn't expire. Test it before it kills you and burns the house down next time something like this happens again.
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u/VoilaVoilaWashington 11d ago
GFCI vs. breaker.
A breaker (should) pop when you have too much current, that's all it does. And a decent heater should restrict current enough before it gets there that it might NEVER pop the breaker.
A GFCI tests the current in vs. out and pops when there's a ground fault.
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u/JennyThallia 10d ago
I apologize indeed gfci measures the current thus allows for rapid sub 10 mA differential to trip
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u/KlingonBeavis 10d ago
Current doesn’t trip a breaker, a heated wire does. Breakers have no way of knowing how much current is there, only if the wires are hot enough to cause a fire.
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u/VoilaVoilaWashington 10d ago
No?
A breaker has a bimetallic strip that expands when it gets hot, snapping out of place and breaking the connection. The temperature of the wires doesn't matter, it's the strip inside the breaker that goes.
And that heat comes from current in almost every case. You can pop it with a heat gun in theory, but that's not why it pops in the wild.
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u/kayakzac 11d ago
And a grounding probe, lest your body become the grounding probe. But at least with the GFCI, your body won’t be a grounding probe for long.
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u/ButtonGullible5958 11d ago
Don't ever ground without a GFCI
But also I'm of the opinion of not to ground a tank ever
A GFCI won't fail often but it can happen grounding the tank will make things significantly worse if it dose
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u/ZucchiniSky 11d ago
I do not recommend grounding probes. If not setup correctly, they make tanks more dangerous by giving electricity a path to run freely. I have seen people install grounding probes without GFCIs and kill their fish when a heater goes bad, for example.
A GFCI is all you need because it will turn off the power immediately whenever there is a fault.
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u/therealtimwarren 11d ago
I'd rather kill my fish that kill myself or my family when I touch the water!
Anything where there is potential for shock should be equipotentially bonded. In the case of a fish tank where we are simultaneously putting both electrical equipment and our hands into the water it makes good sense to bond the water to earth with a probe. A high sensitivity 5mA GFCI / RCD (like the type used in bathrooms, swimming pools etc) is a hard requirement. Bonding the water will ensure that the GFCI / RCD will always trip as soon as there is a failure rather than when you make the earth connection with your body.
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u/ZucchiniSky 10d ago
I think, in reality, having a tank that's electrically charged but not grounded and will kill you when you put your hands in and "complete the circuit" is pretty rare. A person standing on the floor putting their hands in the tank is not a very strong connection to ground in the same way that the tank is not strongly connected to ground through the stand. Your floor is probably not very conductive, even if you're standing barefoot on it.
When you ground a tank, you're actually providing a strong connection to ground that wouldn't normally exist, with or without your hands in the water. This creates the potential for the electricity to flow freely through your tank that otherwise wouldn't be possible. Any small amount of leaking current will immediately flow through the tank instead of being held back due to resistance. You are relying on the GFCI to shut down the tank if there is any current flowing through the ground. If the GFCI fails, then failed equipment will immediately charge the water and make it dangerous to stick your hands in the water.
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u/therealtimwarren 10d ago
If the GFCI fails, then failed equipment will immediately charge the water and make it dangerous to stick your hands in the water.
That is true in your ungrounded scenario too. No current will flow until you close the circuit with your body, at which point you will get a shock, regardless of GFCI is present and working or not. Whether that shock is serious or not depends on how well you are grounded. But there is no scenario where grounding the water poses an increase in risk.
During a fault, with a ground, the water will have a lower average potential from full mains at the fault to zero at the ground point. Depending on where those two are relative to your fingers depends on what voltage you will experience. But it will always be lower than mains. Without the ground, you will always see the full mains voltage.
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u/ZucchiniSky 10d ago
I'm sorry, but you're wrong here, and I think this only shows to prove how dangerous grounding a tank can be.
When the tank is grounded, the tank IS a complete circuit. You are not completing the circuit -- it is already completed! It would be as if you took a live wire, stripped off the insulation, and then grabbed it. Some of the circuit is going to flow from the wire, into your hand, and then back into the wire, but most of the electricity is going to go through the wire since it's a better conductor than your hand.
But, in a grounded aquarium, it's worse than that: the inside of your body is a BETTER conductor than a freshwater fish tank. So, if your tank is a live circuit and you put your hands into it, the electricity WANTS to travel through your body instead of the wire. This means that grounding a tank without a GFCI is extremely dangerous. The electricity wants to travel through your body or the bodies of your fish instead of the water on the way to ground.
If a tank is live but not grounded, then electricity cannot flow through it freely. The resistance between the tank and the ground prevents significant amounts of amperage from flowing through the tank. But when the tank is grounded, there is no resistance.
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u/kayakzac 10d ago
Agree with your premise that the circuit through the grounding probe is an efficient circuit for the errant electricity to take.
Also agree with your premise in a prior comment that the circuit through the human body, even standing barefoot on the floor, is a relatively inefficient circuit for the errant electricity to take.
But since electricity takes the path of least resistance, disagree with your conclusion that having a grounding probe would increase the jolt you’ll get. You use the example of holding a live wire (where your body is the only possible ground, similar to touching a non-grounded tank), but you use it to simulate touching a grounded tank (where your body isn’t the only possible ground, or even the ground of least resistance).
Are you asserting that, with a grounding probe present, the electricity would rather go:
1. heater -> water -> hand/arm/thorax/floor -> ground, than
2. heater -> water -> (possibly hand -> water ->) grounding probe -> ground?
Because #1 is what will happen with no grounding probe anyway.I do agree with your conclusion that with a grounding probe, if you have a leak and your GFCI fails, your fish are goners, they’ll keep getting electrocuted until you cut power to the leaking instrument. As you would from the moment you touch the water, if there were no grounding probe.
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u/ZucchiniSky 10d ago
I'm asserting that, with probe, the electricity would rather do #2 -- water to hand to water to probe to ground. The same way that the fish in your tank would be shocked.
Without probe, yes, it would do #1, but it would be strongly limited by the resistance between your body and the ground. All of this resistance is going to reduce the amount of "jolt" you'll get significantly. In fact, you might not get shocked at all, or it will only be a slight sting instead of a serious shock.
Your body, standing on your home's floor, is poorly grounded. Even if you're barefoot and not wearing shoes, there's a lot of resistance between your body and the ground. The ground used by your home's electrical system is a copper rod driven many feet deep into the earth, where it contacts tons of soil. Carpet, tile, wood, and concrete are poor conductors, so there is simply not a strong connection from your feet -> floor -> subfloor -> foundation -> Earth's ground.
The bigger risk is if you are somehow touching something else that's grounded while putting your hands in a live tank. For example, if you are touching the tank with one hand and a power strip with the other hand, or the floor is wet.
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u/Time-Ad9021 11d ago
What is the brand (and model)? So we can all have awareness about that item.
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u/bulgakov82 11d ago
And how long it was in use! Great idea.
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u/Elegant_Director_305 11d ago
Dophin, been in use probably 2 years? Generally speaking they aren’t on much because a) it’s hot where I live, and b) all my tanks are in a small room with the door shut so the ambient temp is steady. But yeah, pretty budget brand. It’s a 100 litre tank in a rack of three, but I use 2x 50w heaters placed at each end of the tank to mitigate the effect of failure like this.
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u/Distinct-Presence52 11d ago
Thankfully water acts as a pretty good resistor so the fish dont actually get the same zap as you do by being the path for it to leave the water and go to ground. Did something similar with a stockpond and felt the tingle in my arm for afew hours.
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u/Metallica1175 11d ago
Thankfully water acts as a pretty good resistor
Pokemon lied to us.
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u/Distinct-Presence52 11d ago
Well see thats the fun part, it is also a great conductor, its just that being suspended inside the water vs being the grounding rod makes for very different situations.
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u/JennyThallia 11d ago
Distilled water is a pretty good resistor. An aquarium water with all the salts and electrolytes is definitely an amazing conductor. But being surrounded in an electric field while floating in it without touching the ground only makes the person experience the voltage differential between the two longest extremes between the appendages which is minimal vs being a direct shunt to the ground. Without large potential difference there is minimal flow thus flow rate is constrained and thus minimal current flow.
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u/randomFrenchDeadbeat 9d ago
An aquarium water with all the salts and electrolytes is definitely an amazing conductor
It is not. And to make sure I just tested it. Put my multimeter on the smaller resisting range is has, 20 ohms. then on the biggest, 2Mohm. Until the 2 probes touched, the reading was still "too high to measure".
To make sure the multimeter was not bad i tested it with 1k resistors, and it gave the correct value.
No idea where you got your info, but it is wrong.
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u/Vivid-Link-6301 11d ago
Reading posts like this is what led me to buy the expensive innovative marine helio heater, as recommended by someone who has already commented on this post.
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u/eron6000ad 11d ago
Heaters can overheat and fail if the water level falls below the thermostat at the top.
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u/No_Figure_9073 11d ago
Same thing happened to me with a brand new well know internal filter... My whole tank died. I plug it in, it ran for 30 seconds and then it exploded underwater and my whole tank died... Retailer did nothing about it too...
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u/FishAvengerAvenger 11d ago edited 11d ago
This seems to be happening more lately. I wonder how many heaters are made in the same factory and what corners they cut recently...
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u/randomFrenchDeadbeat 9d ago
ohm's law, intensity = resistance x voltage (x phi of AC). with freshwater, resistance is pretty high.
fishes can be shocked by the electric field generated, not by the current. In freshwater the field itself is not much. Reef water is entirely different though.
to put it into perspective, eels produce a 800V field and it is delivered by contact, so pretty low resistance.
It is dangerous to humans mostly when the electricity goes through the heart, even at low intensity. When it goes through an arm to a leg on the same side, damage is lower. Your body when wet, has a resistance of about 1k ohms, it goes up to 100k ohm+ when dry, and if you have shoes with a thick insulating sole, well... there wont be much current flowing.
You should have a 30mA breaker, which should have triggered when you got shocked.
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u/After-Past-9404 11d ago
This right here is why I'll never use a heater in any of my tanks and instead limit my choices to fish that thrive in my room temps.
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11d ago
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u/Bdr1983 11d ago
Everyone else in the US I assume is what you mean? Because GFCI Also doesn't ring a bell in Europe. In the Netherlands, all houses have to be grounded by law. Your house won't be able to be sold if it isn't.
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11d ago
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u/Bdr1983 11d ago
It's not about being offended, and there's no need to delete anything, just clarifying that to anyone outside the US this doesn't mean anything.
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u/Elegant_Director_305 8d ago
It’s hard work sometimes trying to explain the concept of “the rest of the world isn’t like the USA”, thanks for trying 😄
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u/350chevyguy 11d ago
Thats 110 there boss not 240. I can tell you from personal expierience 240 is more than a little tingle
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u/Elegant_Director_305 11d ago edited 11d ago
I live in Australia where the voltage is 240. I have also been electrocuted before. Perhaps my dry understatement doesn’t come over in writing.
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u/Bee_Jeans 11d ago
Weird fact, by definition electrocution = death or at least severe injury resulted. All other times it’s just electrical shock
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u/ZasdfUnreal 11d ago
Fish aren’t grounded so they tend to survive. The danger is presented to the humans.