Mobile Bay Reef Keepers

I have my AQII set to cut off my lights at 83 degrees and keep them off for 30 minutes to cool the tank. Problem is that with the 120 volt 5 inch fans i still could not run the halides long. Now I changed the fans to 4 inch fans cause the old ones were loud and wore out, well now I cannot even run my VHO for long without it cutting off. I guess until i find a remedy I will do the frozen 20 ounce bottle of water in the sump trick but this sucks. I have a chiller in my closet but no where to run in and its kinda expensive to run anyway. I have some 92mm fans coming but I am thinking 3-4 of them in the hood. Wow anyone else run temps like mine ??

Would you have the clearance on the sides for the 120mm fans?

If you mean on the sides of the canopy, I would rather not cut into the canopy if possible. Would they fit in the sides ? YES Do i want to ? NO

LOL!! Well crap.. just lower the temp in the house. The power company loves this solution:)

Probably don't want to put in the durso stand-pipe then, as the water falling in the overflow would help cool it.

Do you have any fans over the sump? I only have 3 VHO's and at one time a 175 and my temp rarely got above 83. My fan only ran when the MH was on and not only runs in the evening for about 4 hours. What is your low temp? You might be able to turn the heater down a bit.

Scott

Well the durso is in, yeah I do need to check the temp probe with a real thermometer and also get those bigger fans in. Lights cut off 5 times tonight.

I hate to say it, but the key is to have fan(s) mounted in the canopy... I originally just had the slits on the top of mine w/ no fan, and my temp shot up to 85+ in two days... putting one 5" fan in the side of the canopy keeps the temp down to my set temp of about 81. That's with 2x175 MH and 2x110 VHO in a 5' wide hood.

How far are your bulbs from the water?

I'm only running one 4 inch fan on my tank right now and seem to be able to keep the temp at 82. Thats with a 3 bulb VHO setup, one 175w mh and one 250w mh. The house temp is around 74 i guess. The one thing that is odd is that i have one of those stick on thermometer for the outside of the tank and it says that the temp is up over the max reading, but i have two floating thermometers in the tank, one in the tank and one in the sump and they both read the same, about 82. The stand pipe should help. If you have a warm room temp you are not going to cool the tank with just fans, but removing the warm air from the hood should help. If you have an open back hood you could mount the fans on the top of the canopy blowing up. It will pull the air in from the back and take the warm air at the tops of the canopy out the top. I thought i was going to have to do that to mine but have been lucky so far.

That's a good point about the ambient temp.... the ambient never gets above 75-76 in our house, so all it requires is pumping air through teh canopy to keep the water evaporating and cool.... what's the ambient temp in your house during the day Kevin?

I was thinking of the way some people use to water cool a cpu is why I think the overflow might help to cool it.
Waterfall/bong cooling or whatever they call it using a pvc pipe to evaporate water to cool it. Seems if you were to point a fan toward the overflow you would have basically the same thing, but would I am sure have to replace more water.

Didn't have any problem until it started warming up during the day but we also didn't have a problem until we change fans(for quieter ones). Hence the reason we are going back to the other type we had. I sure Kev will let you know what happens.

My bulbs are far enough from the water and we never had a problem before. I now know what the problem is, after I pulled the radio shack fans off that is when the problem started. They were getting noisy so i pulled them. I just back back from the shack with replacement ones and will put them on tonight. The problem was with the CFM's of the new fans was not enough to keep it cool and the lights were cooking my water.