Chillers?

[ReefMan419]

Anyone every thought of making a chiller out of a mini-fridge?

I bought a scratch and dent mini-fridge today at lowes and thought I might try it and see the results. I figured what I would do is coil up a few feet of hose into the fridge, cut two holes for the hose to go through. Pump water from my sump through my UV, then through the tube into the fridge and then back into the sump. I'm not made of money right now, but I DO need to bring down my temps in my tank. The last two days my tank has been at 92 F, sucky thing for having MH's on a tank now instead of VHO's.

Any thoughts would be greatly appriciated.

-Kevin

 

[skippysmind]

That might work, you would want at least a hundred feet of looped up tubing so the air contact time would be as long as possible. Set the temp to the coldest setting and get a supply pump with a very slow flow rate to also improve contact time with the cold air.
Try it out and let us know.

 

[Dubbin1]

I hear they don't work very well. You may want to look into a window ac unit.

 

[OneThunder]

I have the same problem. I have been filling 20 oz coke bottles with water, freezing them and floating them in my tank. I also altered the time the lights are on to the cooler evenings. Hope this helps.

 

[ReefMan419]

Thanks Dubbin and everyone for your input. Before doing anything with the mini-fridge, I had put in an old window ac unit into the window in the room, and that seems to have worked good. The temps in the tank have gone down to around 74ish. Time to plug the heater back in, and try to keep the temps more stable around 78 to 80.

 

[Spuds725]

Its been done (the fridge) but you might need alot of heat exchange with your tank-- which means alot of flow/tubing-- submerging the tubing in water in the fridge might help-- improve conduction.

The AC will cool you too though

 

[selgado]

I agree with Spuds. I've seen people try it with poor results. Thermal transferance would be quite inefficient as the exchange has to be made using air which is a poor thermal conductor. The only way I would put money on a working chiller using a mini fridge is if you were to seal the fridge and put in some type of liquid preferably one with high thermal conductivity properties, if possible, or at least water.