Fridge

[TJ]

Bought one of these mini-fridges the other day for my Japanese Clawed Salamanders (Onychodactylus japonicus), which I'd been keeping in the vegetable compartment of my normal fridge until they were evicted

by my girlfriend (they require temps below 20C).

This pic is of the one in the shop, but mine's exactly the same. Transparent door, internal light. A hole is drilled through the right side to allow a thermostat to be passed through and then sealed up around the cord. The fridge cord is then plugged into a temperature control device. Nifty!

 

[ralf]

Yep. Nifty!!
Does it still work, when flipped to one side (to increase the cooled bottom surface)?

Ralf

 

[coen]

I've never seen something like that before! Aren't there any professional cooler products for this? So you can let's say cool a tank in other ways than add frozen water bottles etc.

 

[richard]

I've got an idea to cool water down, although it's a bit combersome. You can make/buy copper coils that are made so water enters the tubing at the top of the coil, spirals down the coil, then back up and out the top... so you've got a coil with an in and out at the top. Basicly, this little device is a heat exchanger. My dad uses regular tap water through one of these coils to cool off boiling beer wert. If you've got some extra room in your freezer, you could put a cooler full of antifreeze in the freezer and run lines out and back into the cooler through the freezer door (leaving enough slack to be able to open the door and not fling antifreeze everywhere). Then you could run that coldness through the heat exchange coil in the tank water and back into the freezer. You could even put a thermostat in the water to control the pump that moves the antifreeze and tune the temperature. I'd recon that with a 5 gal cooler in the freezer you could probably get enough cooling power to freeze a tank if you wanted to, or just run it through many tanks.

It's a lot of work to get it all going, but it might be practical if you've got hundreds of gallons of newt water that's too warm.

Gotta watch out for the antifreeze though... not exacly fish friendly... I don't know about copper, but if it is toxic, stainless steel could be used just the same.

 

[juraj]

I`d prefer stainless steel because surface of the tube is soon coated with copper oxide which is widely toxic.

 

[richard]

good to know