Choosing a Fish Tank Heater

"Okay, besides filtration, your heat unit is most important, too and as with any other thing you purchase, you pretty much get what you pay for. This lower end type of heater will do the job, but it presents some problems in that circuitry is not as good, so you'll find these won't last as long. The glass is not shatter proof, as far as setting the temperature; it's a little more difficult. You have a basic dial here, you're going to have to go with an outside thermometer to tell you what temperature that your water is set at and then, pay attention to when the light goes on and off. This will do the job, it will get you by, but we do like the higher end type of heaters. This is a Visatherm, it's actually encased in a hard plastic. One thing that does occasionally happen, especially with bigger fish, your Oscars and so on, will actually shatter the heater, so this prevents that from happening. It's also got this nice little thermometer gage here, allowing you to set it to whatever temperature you want and then you're done. You set it to seventy-eight, you set it there and the heater does the rest of it. The other aspect that's nice about these higher end thermometers is that, very often they're submersible and you can put them so they're out of the way. You could put a rock in front of this so you'd never even see that, or some sort of other, a log or something like that, so you'd never even see it. So, in setting the heater up, you want to make sure that you have the heater in the water for at least fifteen, twenty minutes so it doesn't crack when you turn it on. So, you want that heater, whether it's the low end one or the high end heater, you want that in the water for a good amount of time to get acclimated to the same temperature water there. So, we're going to plug this in and get the heat going here."