How much do fans cool?

The Cardinal

Swede living in Finland
I was planning on buying a coolingdevice consisting of 6 fans (7x7cm/fan) which I would direct towards the surface. The company claim that the temperature will cool the water around 3-4 degrees celcius. This sounds a lot to me and offcourse it depends on the tank and the fans but I would like to know what your experiences are with similar solutions. Can I really expect a temperature decrease in the region of 3-4 degrees? I have a 100 gallon tank with 6x54w T5.

The product looks similar to this:
http://www.caudata.org/cc/images/articles/cooling/cool2.jpg

Thanks!

Peter
 
I didnt follow your link, but the answer is absolutely.

Properly set up fans can easily cool your tank by several degrees due to evaporation.
 
yes, a fan--even the weakest--will cool it down 5 degrees, but water evap. is 1-2 gallons/day.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10450049#post10450049 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by wrott
yes, a fan--even the weakest--will cool it down 5 degrees, but water evap. is 1-2 gallons/day.

Thanks for the quick replies.

Wow, that sounds like a lot. Is this from personal experience (not implying that you are wrong in any way)?
 
How much you have the ability to cool is going to depend on many things including your lights, pumps and ambient room temp and humidity among other things, as will how much you actually evaporate.

For instance, as far as the evaporation thing goes, i lose 4 gallons a day on my 90 due to evaporation and i dont run any fans whatsoever, just lots of suface agaitation.

If your ambient room temp is warmer than the tank and also high humidity in the room, you arent going to be able to cool nearly as much with fans as if the conditions were more condusive for it
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10450082#post10450082 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by flyyyguy
How much you have the ability to cool is going to depend on many things including your lights, pumps and ambient room temp and humidity among other things, as will how much you actually evaporate.

For instance, as far as the evaporation thing goes, i lose 4 gallons a day on my 90 due to evaporation and i dont run any fans whatsoever, just lots of suface agaitation.

If your ambient room temp is warmer than the tank and also high humidity in the room, you arent going to be able to cool nearly as much with fans as if the conditions were more condusive for it

Good points Flyyyguy, I was mainly interesting in approximate figures, preferably based on personal experiences. I also have a lot of surface movement from one of my pumps and I expect this to have a similar cooling effect (though not the same as the temperature is the same).
 
my cube was running 88-90 degrees until i added a fan over the tank and over the sump..now, it runs 78-81. the drawback is i evaporate almost 5 gallons a day. i have my house AC on 74 when im not there during the day, and it kicks down to 72 at 5pm till 7am.
 
My fan makes all the difference in temp, a little more evaporation, but worth it to keep a constant temp. I use 6x54 watt t5's over a 75, with no problems, so I say go for it!
 
my temp can hit 88degrees without a fan. with a fan it will not break 82.

evaporative cooling is VERY powerful, its one of few passive cooling methods that can yeild sub ambient temps. its the same idea behind perspiration on humans. thats how we dont die whenever the temp goes over 98 degrees.
 
Two little PC style fans cool my 75 enough that the heater kicks on even with the lights on (T5).

I run the fans primarily to keep the T5 lights cooler.
 
As everyone has stated, evaporitive cooling is a powerful tool for aquarists. If you don't mind topping off extra water constantly, a well placed, quality fan can drop the hottest tanks up to 10ºF. Without fans, my tank will reach about 92ºF. One fan in the canopy drops it to about 82ºF, and a fan under the stand just to circulate air and not blow across the top of the water will drop me below 80ºF, but my heaters kick on and I stay about 80-81ºF; just where I like it. Without the heaters, I drop down to about 76ºF
 
I have a "big" desk fan as apposed to a little 120mm type desk fan over my 24g and it lowers it over 10 degree's. It's on a 24g nano with out a lid. The only thing I don't like about is that it will fight with my heater to keep it at 78 :) And it's a manual process as it's not hooked up to a thermostat/controller on the tank temp. So if I don't watch the weather in the morning or one of the roomies doesn't turn on the AC the house can get hot and then the tank gets hot.
 
cardinal..before my fans i was only evaporating a little over a gallon a day, so, you can see it has increased DRAMATICALLY...but, my corals look better than they ever have.

another positive to evaporation is if you are dosing kalk for Ca additions..just add the kalk to your topoff and watch your corals explode from the calcium increase.
 
Back
Top