A cheap chiller?

[brian]

Had an idea for a tank chiller that I wanted to run by folks and see if it has already been done and what the results might be...

I have a 30 gallon long tank, setup as half land/water. Thinking of using a small lunch size cooler and placing 2 or 3 frozen gel packs inside, then placing an aquarium air pump inside, running the airline tubing into the tank.

In theory, the cooled air in the cooler should get pushed through the tubing by the pump and cool the tank??? in the cooler, the ice packs should last for awhile, right? any thoughts or experiences?

 

[dane]

people have done something like this befor, running a tube into the tank from and external source of cold

 

[brian]

I'll give it a try. Was just wondering how effective it will be.

 

[michael]

Hi Brian,
Welcome aboard. I think cold water would be much more effective than air. Simply blowing a fan over the top does lower water temp some by evaporation. I broke down and bought a cheap chiller. I drilled a hole in one of those acrylic tanks to install and just finished insulating 3 sides with styrofoam. I'll report later on how it works out.

 

[jennifer]

Running air tubing through a cooler will have little to no effect on tank temperature, in my experience (I tried it for a couple of days with a cooler of ice water). I agree with Michael that running tank water through the cooler (using a water pump) is more likely to work. There have been some successful attempts with this method discussed on the axolotl forums, if you want to try some searches of old posts.

In my opinion, the cheapest method to reduce water temp is an air fan. If you have reasonably dry air, you can get a surprising decrease in water temp. This is a bit problematic if you have animals that stay on land, as you could dry out the animals, though.

Whatever you try, let us know how it goes!