I had been out all day and came home about 6pm to find all of my tropical fish in my 4ft tank stone-cold dead or unfortunately in this case, red hot dead. There was obviously a major fault with me tank heater as it had risen from 80f to 105f which obviously cooked all of my fish.

I have had these fish a good few years and i am absolutely devastated.I hadnt even contemplated that a heater could malfunction this drastically.the heater is only just over a year old.

Has this happened to anyone else?

sorry to hear that mate, luckly my heater cant get any hotter than 29c so that only fish that it might catch out short term will probs be my neons

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complain!

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Oh that is just awful...

Unfortunately, yes I do know of it happening to someone else. I'd definitely take the heater back and complain. At the very least, they could replace some of the stock for you. I'm paranoid about heater malfunction and check the tank thermometers every morning just in case. I've had two heaters break on me but in those cases, they stopped working so the temperature dropped as opposed to getting stuck on, as in your case..

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Make sure before going back to complain, you take photo's of your tank with the dead fish inside, and and take a photo of the temp gauge on your tank so they can see what temp it reached after breaking, otherwise they will try and give your a load of crap about it wasnt the heater.
sorry to hear about your loss.

Best thing to do to avoid this happening is to get 2 lower wattage heaters instead of 1 of the recommended tank size wattage. If one breaks "on" the other will turn off and that tank will take much longer to heat up to dangerous levels so more chance of noticing. If it breaks in the off position then the other is there as back-up.

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I've had a similar thermostat failure killing fish I'd kept for years.
When I set up another tank I'll be looking for some kind of fail safe thermostat.

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Adopted King Snake

I've had it happen to me severa timesL heaters are really crap.
I had a pair of convict cichlids given that I didnt want and the heater overheated and killed them, had the same thing happen with a polypterous that was kept on its own, it killed it. I also had it happen to a marine tank and killed everything. My brother had some fish of mine in his attic and the heater stopped working and they all died from the cold. I've had heaters conk several other times but cought them in time. I think your better off with a seperate stat than heater/stat combined.

Now that is actually a very good idea!

Sorry about your fish!

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sorry to hear that mate i have read about heaters and they recon u should be replacing them about every five years or so on average life. I have had one last over ten years before it packed in i agree its a good thing to add a extra stat for the price of them as the heaterstats are not that reliable the quickest one of mine to pack in was 18 months so u never know