Temp

[terry4505]

My temp touched 84 yesterday. I turned off the daylights (leaving the two actinic lights on their normal cycle) and placed a fan over the sump. Is there anything else I can do to lower the temp? My ATO adds cool RO/DI water which helps a tiny bit.

I have thought about replumbing the sump to the basement to deal with this issue.

 

[truebeliever71]

Terry,

If your sump is inclosed under your tank I don't think the fan will too much for you since you need to get circulation in the cabinet. I have a small clip on fan over my tank and it does a great job at cooling. I also have a couple milk and plastic Juicy Juice jugs filled RO water in the freezer to stick in the sump if the temp gets too high.

 

[EllieSuz]

I have another fan besides the one blowing across the sump and it's a little one that sits on the top of the tank. Both of them are controlled by the RKL. I don't always need to use both, but when the weather gets really hot, I turn them both on. A basement sump is a sure fire solution, but not possible for all of us.

 

[tmz]

Some float pop bottles full of ice water but evaporative cooling with (a) fan/ fans blowing across the water surface seems to be the most effective method, short of a chiller or an air conditioned room.

 

[Tonynlo]

You can add fish bags of frozen RO water in your sump if you get into a pinch, or just drop the frozen block in and top off as they melt.

 

[WDLV]

I finally broke down and bought a chiller. It was worth the investment. My water stays between 78 and 80 now + 1 degree.

 

[cjrudy]

Not really sure if a chiller is worth it in WNY, especially if you have A/C.

 

[WDLV]

NY gets hot too. NYC is only three hours drive from me and it was over 100 degrees for the last three days here. I used to run my AC to control my tank temp. I don't like the $550 electric bills that follow. I could buy a lot of frags for the difference.

 

[Willistein]

Running my central A/C for 8 hours a day in July might add $50 a month to the bill. Well worth it in my opinion. With that said we didn't run it last night and the house got up to 78 and the tank got up to 83. Ugh.

 

[WDLV]

I have terrible air leakage in my 60 year old house. So, for me a chiller is the better option. The other reason was that my wife had a tendancy to shut down the AC and open the windows on a nice day and forget to open the windows in the basement (where the tanks were) and I'd come home to an overheating tank.

 

[Gary Majchrzak]

My temp touched 84 yesterday. I turned off the daylights (leaving the two actinic lights on their normal cycle) and placed a fan over the sump. Is there anything else I can do to lower the temp? My ATO adds cool RO/DI water which helps a tiny bit.

I have thought about replumbing the sump to the basement to deal with this issue.

basement sump can obviously help cool the system.

So can cool air. Dry air cools an aquarium more efficiently than humid air.

ANY air movement around an aquarium will help cool it.

Try this experiment: grab one of those big box fans and point it at the aquarium from 10ft. away.

IMO/IME a chiller is not a good choice unless you can locate it remote. By remote I mean someplace that's not near the aquarium. It makes no sense to dump heat from the aquarium into the room where the aquarium is located because it creates a "heat loop".... plus it makes EVERYONE IN THE HOUSE hot.
You should be able to design your system so a chiler isn't necessary here in upstate NY.

Cooling an aquarium with ice isn't a good option IMO/IME.

Fans, shutting down lighting and air conditioning/dehumidifiers remain the best choices for cooling an aquarium.

And hey- get rid of those submerged pumps that transfer heat directly into the water

 

[Gary Majchrzak]

a URS "classic post" by Todd

a URS "classic post" by Todd

of "Todd's Torch" fame


a must read thread

excerpt for the lazy:

Kevin just reminded me that I better get back to the library and study for the boards but this is much more fun, so go ahead and get some more coffee Andy (and whatever else Kev) as this is interesting stuff (in response to Guy's question) ==>

Conclusion #2: In order to cool Andy's tank from 88F to 78F by putting 2liter bottles full of ice in the sump rather than using 1 gallon of evaporation you would need 10.66 two liter bottles of ice!!! Glad you brought that up Guy, I hadn't thought about it that way...man, I really appreciate my 2.3 gallons per day of evaporation as I would need another refrigerator to hold the 24.52 bottles of ice each day!!!

Calculations #2:
-Assume that the ice is at 32F and will be melted and then heated to 78F
-heat of fusion of ice tells us that it would take 333 KJ to turn one KG of ice at 32F into one KG of liquid water at 32F. Then to heat the water we would use the specific heat of water to determine that it would take 106.8 kJ to then heat that water to 78F. So per liter it would take 439840.8 J to turn the ice into water at 78F.
-Recall, we needed 8060000J to cool Andy's tank 10F, so we would need 19.55KG of ice to do this.
-Since ice is less dense than water we also have to take into account that we could only put 1.834 liters of water in each bottle to end up with 2L bottles completely filled with ice (otherwise we would have a bunch of broken bottles).
-So as I said above, with 1.834 KG of ice in each bottle at 32F and with time to allow this to completely melt and then warm up to 78F you would end up needing 10.66 bottles to replace one gallon of evaporation!

Man, I'm sure that this stuff isn't on the boards!!!!
Talk to you guys later.
Todd

 

[boosted chemist]

Ya ice doesnt do much, evaporation is the better option. I had a two litter in my 30 gallon system, didnt move the temp (was at 82)

 

[boosted chemist]

Also i was thining of unplugging my heater, so at night it could drop down to mid 70s, but idk fi this is just more stress.

 

[Gary Majchrzak]

Also i was thining of unplugging my heater, so at night it could drop down to mid 70s, but idk fi this is just more stress.

I like this idea and I do something similar: I allow temp to drop down at night without unplugging my heater. A controller makes such things easy. IMO/IME a controller is more valuable than a chiller. I sold my chiller years ago.

 

[boosted chemist]

I like this idea and I do something similar: I allow temp to drop down at night without unplugging my heater. A controller makes such things easy. IMO/IME a controller is more valuable than a chiller. I sold my chiller years ago.

Thats a good idea, how cold do u go? since mine is a nano and im kinda poor in grad school, i wonder if i could set it at 75 for the summer?

 

[tmz]

Dropping the temp at night would help O2 levels at night; offsetting some of nighttime hypoxic issues in a closed system which occur during non photosynthetic periods . Oxygen is less soluble at higher termperatures.

 

[Randrew215]

I'm surprised to hear that nighttime hypoxia is an issue with the protein skimmers that we run. That sort of agitation isn't sufficient to oxygenate the water?

 

[tmz]

It can still be an issue particularly in localized areas . Generally though aeration via skimmers ,surface agitation and mixing flow in the aquarium helps,ignificantly. Opposite photo period coral tanks or macroalgae refugia can be very helpful too.

Eric Borneman did a series of 3 articles called the right to breathe,IIRC. You shouldbe able to find them via google . It deals with oxygen and reef tanks very thoroughly.

 

[WDLV]

There are some really good points stated above and I wanted to acknowledge that before making this next statement....

IME/IMO, killing your lights to try to control temperature kinda defeats the purpose if you ask me. Making one parameter grossly fluctuate in favor of another is not the objective of most hobbyists. I've tried using fans and they DO work, but there is also a point where they become inadequate. If that happens to be on a day when you're at work or on vacation you can get what I came home to back in April of '02 which is a stinky soup of slime, and dead, rotting fish and corals. Temps vary by state but in MD the spring months can fluctuate wildly. I've experienced a 35 degree day followed by a 85 degree day. Such was the reason I came home to a 90+ degree reef stew... and that was using PCFs!

Aside from that, I like that my temp tolerance is much tighter now than it used to be. I've never been one to be a nazi over temp fluctuations because I've dived on enough reefs (didn't take many) to realize it's not uncommon to feel a 10 degree drop in water temperature in a split second when the tides change. It's really not a big issue to me but I know some people are really precision oriented (anal) about nailing down parameters. A fan (in my region at least) is inadequate for this purpose.

Truth be told a combination of as many contributing factors being added or removed as appropriate is probably the best overall strategy.