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An accurate thermometer?

Drouthie

Member
Joined
20 Jun 2009
Messages
70
Location
Liverpool
Hi,

My thermometer is rubbish, it is slow to change temperature and I'm pretty sure wrong.

What are good accurate brands people on here use?

I'm not so worried about day to day temperature but for when I'm doing water changes. I managed to adapt a shower to tap attatchement to a hose to fill up my tank but it was really difficult to tell if the water was the right temperature or not. I don't want to shock my fish.

Cheers
 
When I do water changes the temperature drops from 25C to 19C in winter when I use a hose. On a particularly cold day I add a little warm water with a jug to prevent the temperature going much lower, but my fish cope with this kind of a temperature change in a thirty minute period no problem.

Can`t really help you on the thermometer front, as I have stopped using them since I realised that I never checked any of mine. I do still have a digital one from AE that has high and low alarms on it.
Dave.
 
I used to have 2 digital thermometers and they showed a difference of 5 degrees between the them. I bought a cheap mercury type just to give me an idea of temp.

Now when I change the water I do it by feel: I pump out and to refill; just get the water about half right from mixer taps and fill again. I'm not usually out by more than 2 degrees by holding my hand under the flow.

This said, I can only do this from the mixer taps in the kitchen. When I try it from the mixer in the bathroom (for upstairs tanks) the temp out is stable until I attach the hosepipe then it changes (obviously pressure changes) but never enough to have damaged any livestock!
 
Hi,

Digital thermometers can be very precise but the commonly found ones are obsolete as they always get off calibration over time. The cheapest electronics it has, the faster it will loose accuracy.

It is better to go with alcohol thermometers (wrongly thought to be mercury, as mercury ones are no more allowed and replaced by blue/red coloured alcohol), that will never loose calibration. For fast response, use the very thin thermometers, like JBL ones (4mm)

As of water changes, I use a heater in the water container to avoid too much temperature variations and put less stress on the poor tropical fish
 
I use the cheap 99p Wilko glass ones.Thatnks for the alcohol tip as that has just reassured me :)

BE careful when using glass thermometers. They have the 'circlet' sucker to hold them to the glass and even though you don't notice they tap the glass. I am now on my third in a year due to hairline cracks :) Now I know it is alcohol and not mercury I am not overly concerned.

As oer the previous poster. Its quite hard for most of us to say which is the most accurate. Even if we have 3 and 2 read the same we don't know for sure that the 1 is wrong!!!

AC
 
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