Heat Packs?

[darkdep]

Something Shouganai said in another thread got me thinking...

Those little $1 heat packs that supposedly last for 40 hours...the ones they use when shipping fish...I wonder if you could activate one, and seal it somehow inside something to use it as a heater for an aquarium in the event of a power outage???

Think about it...they are cheap enough to have a stack on hand, and with some sort of aeration (Battery powered air pump) you could probably keep your freshwater tank going for days at a time. 

You'd probably have to keep an eye on the temp (because, of course, the heat packs have no thermostat) but if you checked it every hour or so you could just pull it out for an hour at a time to keep the temp within a reasonable range. 

[sniggir]

great Idea  ....it would be cool if they had batter operated filter's but I have one of those big batteries that I can run things off of in case so I am fine.... I live in kanata,.. we have horible service for electicity....lolololol.... I think I will grab some off the heating pads though save some bat consumption from the heaters

pat

[babblefish1960]

That is a good idea, some sort of watertight vessel to keep them from the water itself, like a mason jar.

When I was off the grid years ago, for some time, what I used was wood heat naturally, but I also used heat mass storage utilizing large clear tubes filled with sodium chlorate.
This 2 foot thick and 5 foot high wall was located between the stone stove and the area the aquariums were in, so the fish didn't suffer heat swings. When the stove was hot, the sodium chlorate soaked it up, and when the stove cooled off, the sodium chlorate acted like adobe and gave off adequate heat for the tanks. The area around the tanks was insulated with blue styrofoam SM, but disguised. It worked very well.

I also had 100 pound steel bottles pressurized with a nitrogen atmosphere mix,(similar to a scuba diving mixture) and had the tanks hooked up to regulators plumbed to the tanks to operate sponge filters and airstones.

[zapisto]

will not work
heat pack use O2 to generate eat by reaction
you will reduce his life time a lot (when i say a lot is a lot) if you seal it inside something
it will consume the O2 is a few hours and then desactivate.
also depend of your tank size this will have minor effect or no effect.

also something to keep in mind , this item have impact on air , not sure water will react same way.

here is why you have to be very careful when you pack fish with breathing bag and you use this item.
you have to be sure or make it so the heat pack will consum the O2 from the box but not the O2 in the immediate area of the breathing bag

[Shouganai]

Yup, zapisto is exactly right.  Consequently, you can conserve a heat pack for later use if you seal it up in something airtight!

The heat packs DO get really hot though (the 40 hour ones average 108F, and the 72hr ones average 100F), so maybe  you'd be better off in a long powerout to bag up the fish and keep them in an insulated vessel with the heat pack for the duration of the temp drop? Some water changes and a battery operated airstone would help, or some of the breathing bags zap mentioned I think.

I just purchased a number of the 40hr heat packs from a reptile supplier, and my plan is to put as many of my reptiles individually in small deli cups and bins within a larger insulated (but ventilated) container to keep their temps reasonable.  The fish would most likely be bagged up and put in a styro container with a heat pack to keep them alive.

[zapisto]

make a lot of sense that way Shouganai.
the fish can stay in bag for hours with no prob if not stress and stay in dark.
also if well prepared the breathing can be awesome, 7 day in there for 12 shrimp and they arrive all alive and actually breeding for me did not lost a single one.

[murgus]

Are these heat packs specifically for fish?  Can I but them at the LFS/LPS?

Andrew

[manytanks]

Thanks for the heads-up re the heat packs. Kinda sounds like a bit of a hassle to moderate the temperature and make it all airtight, etc.

But that got me thinking about what we'd need to do if the power went out for an extended period. Ooops, what am I saying "if"... With Hydro One, it's more like WHEN, not "if". Aside from keeping the house water pipes from freezing, it would be nice to also save all our fish.

Because we're in the country, draw our water from a well and have a sump pump, from painful experience we've had to install a battery operated emergency back-up sump pump in case the primary sump pump fails (again). I do not want to have to remove and dry out carpeting, cut out & replace sodden drywall & insulation, repaint, etc. etc. again. Once was quite enough.

But I digress...

The emergency sump pump runs on a car-size battery (~$120 at Canadian Tire) but is different because it's a "deep-cycle" or "marine" battery that is constantly trickle-charged but doesn't need to be under a constant load like a car battery. It can sit for long periods just doing nothing, then leap to attention and deliver full power when required.

It seems to me that in the event of a power failure I can take that battery and connect it to a 12-volt power inverter (like the ones that plug into the lighter socket in your car) and get 120v AC power to drive at least one heater and one filter - and maybe more. These devices certainly don't draw more than a hardworking sump pump. The battery is also pretty robust; it will run for a couple of hours and pump a relatively huge amount of water out of a basement before running out of power. And it wouldn't have to be constantly running the tank filter in any case, and the heater cycles on and off anyway.

So as long as the power doesn't go off in the rainy season in either spring or fall, I might just fall back on this method to save our fish during a brownout.

Thoughts, anyone?