Need advice! What would you do??

[Odd Duck]

On 6/27/2022 at 2:45 PM, JettsPapa said:

I have the thermostat set to 72°

Same.  But it’s always a bit steamy.  Not as steamy as Florida, we don’t get rain daily, but we get rain weekly to every other week and it’s enough to keep it sufficiently steamy that I go cold before I step out of the shower.  Plus brief episodes of hypothermia build your heat tolerance cellular proteins. 😆 

[Tanked]

Has anyone tried chilling the airline instead of the water?  4 pints of Ice in the 75 made no measurable difference.  It occurred to me that I might try conditioning the air instead.

 

On 6/27/2022 at 11:47 PM, Odd Duck said:

Plus brief episodes of hypothermia build your heat tolerance cellular proteins. 😆

That must be why as a hiker/backpacker, I always found a quick dip in a cold mountain stream to be beneficial.  Our recent heatwave brought the tap water up to 76 degrees which is the minimum I want for the aquariums, and tolerable for a 'cold' shower after work.

[Patrick_G]

On 6/27/2022 at 2:39 PM, Flumpweesel said:

I finally understand why drinks dispensers were added to fridges.  Here in the UK it always seemed like a waste of food storage space.

Haha, but our fridges have A LOT of extra room. 😆

[Odd Duck]

On 6/28/2022 at 9:01 AM, Tanked said:

Has anyone tried chilling the airline instead of the water?  4 pints of Ice in the 75 made no measurable difference.  It occurred to me that I might try conditioning the air instead.

 

That must be why as a hiker/backpacker, I always found a quick dip in a cold mountain stream to be beneficial.  Our recent heatwave brought the tap water up to 76 degrees which is the minimum I want for the aquariums, and tolerable for a 'cold' shower after work.

This is a good thought.  I’m not sure how effective heat transfer would be since air doesn’t carry a lot of thermal mass.  It wouldn’t hurt.  How much it would help, I don’t know.  One could always get a chiller and run lines from various tanks through the chiller.  Get a mini-fridge and run part of the air loop through the mini-fridge via a copper coil?  Air isn’t going to pick up any copper to harm plants or shrimp.  You could put in a bypass with ball valves for summertime heat.  All the air going into your loop would be nice and cool.  Whether that cool would make it to the tanks is another matter since the individual airlines would likely lose the “cool” quickly.  Hard to say if the extra heat produced by the mini-fridge would actually be enough to offset any gain from running airlines through the inside of the fridge.  Might have to plumb it through a wall and keep the fridge in a different room than the fish room.  😆 Getting more elaborate by the minute.  😂 🤣 

Maybe start with running a coil of airline through a bowl of ice.  😆 

[Torrey]

On 6/26/2022 at 12:08 PM, Wrencher_Scott said:

it will cool because water lines are under ground where it is a steady 50 some degrees.

Depends on location.

Summer temps get to 115 F, and there's no shade in the desert. So water towers get hot, and the water lines at 24" buried will be in the 80's pretty quickly. We've had "cold" water come out at 90 F before.

Other countries, like Australia, Kuwait, and the SAE can have areas with even hotter water coming out of the tap.

Totally depends on location.

A bucket in the sink with a frozen water bottle in the bucket, and a pond pump to move it to the tank via the python, may become a  necessity in your future.

[nabokovfan87]

On 6/22/2022 at 7:16 AM, Guppysnail said:

When I need cool and only get hot like that I fill a tub and add ice and dechlorinator. Then use that. It’s a pain but works. I do add it to the tanks slowly so I don’t shock the fish. 

Yeah, this. I take ice during winter and freeze it for summer. The bigger the cubes last slightly longer. I've had major concerns about shocking the glass in the tank so at times I'll use a net or manually keep the ice away from the glass and attempt to help it melt evenly. I've also thrown it into a bucket instead of the tank when I do run into issues and that's an option.

It's a really difficult issue without having a chiller. Honestly, I wish I had one, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement in the hobby when it comes to this topic. Maybe even a HoB filter that integrates some sort of a chiller design (peltier cooling) might be a nice way. You're talking some pretty intense temperatures depending on the plate you choose and some stuff like that.

Maybe there is even a design case for using an external fan, tubing, undergravel filtration parts and adapting something like in floor heating/cooling technology to the hobby.

No idea of any of it really makes sense long term, but that's just my brain trying to note some concepts and explore options to investigate.

There is also the oil cooled PCs where they actually use an aquarium to hold a computer. Which leads me to having one of the massive passively cooled computer heatsinks (there's a specific company) where you would have it in a U shape and one part would be in the tank, stainless steel, no issues there, and what it would do is feed the heat of the water through the block of metal to the side of the heatsink exposed to air. Then you have a fan externally mounted to cool the heatsink or just passively use the air in the room to do so. THATS AN IDEA!

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Ok so, how I handle it here, in my case, is water changes at very late hours when the ground and the water is as cool as possible. As others have mentioned, there is not a massive shock depending how much water you change, but given how much I prefer to change water at once I definitely understand the issue and struggle with it.

There is another company, but this is one of them, and they have massive blocks of metal used for cooling. 

 

[Odd Duck]

Chillers are pretty standard equipment in reef tanks where they battle heat from all the extra lights and pumps used in comparison to typical freshwater tanks.  They also use a lot of fans and add auto-top off systems to make up for the evaporation.  If you’re really battling the heat with no AC to cool the room, then adding fans would be my first choice, adding extra air stones next with the air pump as low as possible to push cooler air through the water, then a chiller if the water was still too warm.  Even dropping water levels a bit can help if you’re using a spray bar on your canister or using HOB’s because it gives the tank at least a dab more of evaporative cooling.  It is possible to make a home-made chiller using a mini fridge, but a commercially made one is likely more energy and space efficient.

[nabokovfan87]

On 6/30/2022 at 11:37 PM, Odd Duck said:

It is possible to make a home-made chiller using a mini fridge, but a commercially made one is likely more energy and space efficient.

Absolutely agreed. Passively though, I think there's ways to adapt other technology from other industries and make it make sense and work, especially for freshwater.

[Tanked]

On 6/28/2022 at 10:21 AM, Odd Duck said:

Maybe start with running a coil of airline through a bowl of ice

I'm thinking my first attempt would be to freeze the tubing inside a 2 liter.  If the freezing water doesn't collapse the air line, I can move from there.  My planted project tank will begin earning its keep again.