Electricity

[MVP]

Hi Guys,

Just wondering if a couple of people who run fish rooms could possibly post or pm me their average kWh. My electricity company is telling mine is something and it seems a bit extreme so just wondering if some people could let me know what theirs is.

Regards

Kim

[Josh]

It depends on what you are running in the room.

I used to run one airpums (65w) and one heater (1200w). If you were using alot of heaters and pumps (water) it would be a lot higher.

I think, and a sparky will correct me, that if my heater runs 24/7 with the air pump I would be using 1.265KWh....so over a day it would cost (@12.85c) it would cost about $0.1625 an hour to run it......thats about $1400 dollars a year and its only 12 tanks. It would be much cheaper in reality because the heater is only plugged in from the middle of autumn till the middle of spring.

An estimate would be that mine costs between $400 and $450 a year or around $115 a quarter.

My tank inside would cost me about $350 a year to run on its own

I hope my wife doesn't see this

Josh

[MVP]

Hows the heater work? like an air con unit or is it hooked into the air somehow?

[bigtank]

Hows the heater work? like an air con unit or is it hooked into the air somehow?

It s just your normal colum heater placed in the centre of the room .

It does help if the room is insulated to keep the warmth in and all doors closed.

I think correct me if im wrong the down side of doin this is you will get a lot of water evaporation .

[Josh]

Yeap its just a column heater and the room is insulated.

I run a small fan in the room to move around the air a bit

using lids on the tanks will cut down evaporation. I lost next to no water from my tanks

[chorrylan]

hiya,

In the fishroom I have about 360 watts of lighting going for 12 hours a day (I can actually get by with just 80 watts but I like having lights directly over tanks rather than just room lighting)

The heating and cooling is a wall hung reverse cycle unit on the end wall that has a power consumption rating of 650 watts when cooling and 840 watts but I'm not sure what it actually uses on average as it's significantly overrated for the room and gets to spend a fair bit of the time idling and is off during much of the day.

There are also a few submersible heaters in the ground level catfish tanks; say 250 watts worth but operating for say 50% of the time max.

There's about 500 watts worth of water and air pumping going on; (I bought a laguna 11000 pump the other day which will replace a pair of old inefficient pumps and reduce that by about 100 watts)

In the wintertime I run two extra 250 watt heaters in the waterchange tanks so there isn't as much ice in 'em for waterchanges (I have two 1000L tanks for conditioning water out the back of the garage in an unsealed but fairly well protected structure. They're insulated as well as I could but it gets darned cold here)

So that's another 500 watts operating for about 5 months a year

Giving a grand total of around 33 KW Hours or $4 per day; $1500/year.

I haven't paid that much attention to it but based on casual observation of my electricity bills that's about right.

If I switched back to the room lighting instead of tank lighting and switched some pumps over to lower power units I could trim this back to an average of 27KH hours/day and save maybe 75c/day or $300/year

In the house I run just two tanks but with a really rough calculation I think they must be chewing up around 10kwH a day (youch)