can you have too much heater?

[hbeth82]

Through several steps of poor planning, I have a 200W Visi-Therm Stealth heater in my 75gal tank (I think it should be at least 250W) and an useless 100W heater in my 20gal tank (set at 84, can barely maintain 77 and is quite erratic). My plan is to upgrade the heater in the 75 gal tank with a larger Visi-Therm and move the 200W heater to the 20gal tank. My concern is that putting a heater intended for 40-60 gal tanks would cook the little residents of my 20gal tank.

So, is it safe to uber-heat a 20 gal tank with the 200W VisiTherm Stealth?

 

[CaptainAhab]

When working properly, your heater(s) will only heat the water to the temperature (give or take) that you set them for. Rather that be singular or multiple.

 

[HN1]

+1. The common advice to use multiple in a tank is for redundancy reasons, not load. A higher wattage will not "uber-heat" the water unless it fails.

 

[JPKeenan]

Found out the hard way to pay the extra few bucks for the submersible heaters. Had one break (not even doing a water change or anything) in a tank I was cycling.

But of course being somewhat of a newbie I thought I would save some $, but cost me in the long run.