Keeping Temperature Down

[shaun1980]

After reading a topic on here about someones heater being broken, a comment on there from someone was that they haven't had their heater on for months as they live in america.

My question is, if In England, as we are supposed to have this year, we get the extremely hot summer, how do you go about keeping the temp of the water down to reasonable for the fish??

 

[Miss Wiggle]

cheapest and best way to keep them cool is to keep the temp of the room they are in down.

leave a fan running in the room facing towards the tank, leave curtains/blinds closed during the day, leave the lid of the tank open to allow for evaporation.

expensive but excellent solution is to get an aquarium chiller, probably cost you a couple of hundred quid though.

if you find it's overheating then do small daily water changes with cooler water, you can freeze small bottles of water then float these in the tank to cool things down. however don't just put ice in the tank as this will cause too much of a sudden temp drop.

don't worry about turning the heater down/off, it'll be on a thermostat and just come on as nescessary so if it's hot it won't come on, it's easy to turn them off and forget then if it gets cold one night or towards the end of summer you may forget to turn it back on.

the most important thing of all though is aeration, the hot water means there's less oxygen in the water which can cause serious problems. make sure the filter output breaks the water surface and makes ripples, put an airstone on if you can.

 

[jimw13uk]

if you want to install a chiller then the easiest way to do it is to buy an old fridge and drill two holes in it - 1 at the top of one side and the other at the bottom of the other side. Then feed the pipe from your tank to your filter through it making sure you loop quite a bit of pipe inside the fridge - then back to the tank and thus you have a cheap chiller

Ok its not the prettiest thing in your front room but if its in a place you could do this then I did it a couple of years back and it chilled the water nicely and worked for the few months i needed it. After that I took the fridge to the tip and hooked my tank back up as it was before.

 

[CFC]

There are various ways of keeping the temperature down in your tank but the biggest thing to remember is to oxygenate the water as much as you can as the warmer the water the less free oxygen it holds, during hot weather position all filter returns near the surface so they agitate the water and allow faster gas exchange and add airstones to the tank, dropping the water level by a couple of inches also helps.

During the summer months i keep the tank lights off as much as possible litterally just switching them on for a few minutes to do a head count and make sure everything is ok i also switch off all non essential equipment such as UV sterilisers and of course the heaters themselves, i have a large fan pointed at the tank to keep air circulation going over the front and lid of the tank and when it gets really hot i put the external filter in a poly box and fill the box with ice packs so that the water flowing through the filter is chilled. Some people float bottles of ice in the tank but i find that this has a very short working period before the bottle needs replacing.
When things get really bad twice daily 10% water changes with cooler water helps for a short period as well.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

when it gets really hot i put the external filter in a poly box and fill the box with ice packs so that the water flowing through the filter is chilled.

thats a good idea i've not heard before

 

[shaun1980]

Thank you for your help/ Ideas, My filter return is pointed such that it agitates the surface anyway and I do have two airstones in the tank, so that shouldn't be a problem. I am just a little worried that when I am at work and not tending to the tank that it will overheat and I am not there to do anything about it.

 

[sophos9]

What happens in the instance of a planted tank?

Surface agitation will release too much CO2 (I presume dissolved oxygen saturation will be less due no pearling) and will lights off cause issues with plants/algae?

Guess its the frozen bottles...?

 

[Miss Wiggle]

What happens in the instance of a planted tank?

Surface agitation will release too much CO2 (I presume dissolved oxygen saturation will be less due no pearling) and will lights off cause issues with plants/algae?

Guess its the frozen bottles...?

keep the temp low so as to keep the water oxygenated, or if you have lots of peraling all day every day that will help oxygenate your water.

so yeah frozen bottles, fans blowing on the tank, keep the temp of the room as cool as possible.

 

[chilledtim]

Ive been looking for a small batterered up fridge to do a similar mod to keep a UK rockpool life tank.
Trouble is people often throw away old fridges like that or PAY to get them taken away because the door doesnt stay shut anymore ect. Not nowing that people like me would slip them a tenner just for the chiller unit and motor lol

Im abit worried about my coldwater tanks heating up to much this summer. There 1st summer in my room which gets the hottest in the house! The tips here have been useful