<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=11869697#post11869697 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by eznet2u
Oh wait...Just noticed you are in Florida...Where humidity lives all year.
In the Central Valley of California this works 99% of the time. We have a DRY heat...you know...LIKE YOUR OVEN!!! :)
With the high Florida humidity, you would have a hard time evaporating enough water to offset the pump running the cooler.
How about a ground loop.
I live in Houston and face the year-round humidity too. I Looked into the evap cooling before building my chiller and figured that it wasnt worth the investment of my time and resources for a system that might work.
I decided to go with the window A/C Freon type system. It works great. I have the evaporator inside and the condenser outside so all of the heat removed from the tank goes outside.
As far as the ground loop option, liveforphysics posted the following in <a href=http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1312010&perpage=25&pagenumber=1>THIS </a>thread. I know that the ground loop isnt new, but Live had some good ideas for the in-ground heat exchanger.
"Due to having plans to be running plumbing outside, you could use a more eco friendly option. This is something you may want to try.
Buy a stick of 20ft 3/8" Ti tubing. Take it to someone with a pipe bender, who will take his time and make a nice bend in the bottom so you are left with a 10ft long U-bend. Hire a fence crew or a foundation crew to dig you a single hole in your backyard (somewhere near where you are routing plumbing) about 10ft deep with a hole digger. They will have to have a 4ft extension shaft on a 5ft auger to dig the hole. It shouldn't take more than 30mins to dig if your ground isn't all packed with rocks and the guy is skilled. Might cost you about $50-100bucks. Go to a machine shop with a couple of heavy duty garbage bags. Tell them you want to buy a couple garbage bags full of aluminum turnings/chips from a waste tub. They will either just give it to you or charge $5-10. Next pickup about 8-10 sacks of cement (cement, not concrete) and some hot water heater pipe insulation and insulation tape. Foam wrap and tape off the upper 2-3 feet of the titanium pipes, and install whatever hose ends you find best suited for your plumbing (likely some sort of slip over and lock type fitting).
Stick the U-bend in the hole, and pour in the trash bags filled with alumium turnings. They might fill the hole all the way up, but they are going to get crushed down when you start adding the cement powder in. Get a hose running down in the hole and start pouring in the cement bags onto the aluminum shavings. Keep the hose knocking the cement dust to the bottom while you are adding more cement bags. Do this until the hole is filled up to the point where the insulation on the tubes starts. You have no need to try to form a heatsink here, as the ground in the first couple feet of very hot areas in very hot days could be above desired water temperature, which would be conter-productive to the cooling of the water. The ground 4-9ft down however will be cool. Likely always staying below 65deg.
Now you have an enviromentally friendly high power chiller that costs only the power of the small pump to circulate water through to operate. You could have it plugged into your reef controller just like your chiller would be. However, you need some tiny little 1-2 gallons per hour of flow circulating through the loop at all times to prevent the water from going bad from lack of oxygen. It doesn't take much, perhaps just a little dedicated MJ400 throttled back to a dribble but always running.
Now you can easily have a very powerful chiller without the 500-1000w drain on power, or adding heat into the room the chiller is located in.
You might think I'm crazy for thinking the ground is 65deg(or less) on a +100deg day. I work in the datacenter industry, and these ground cooling loops are being used in an Arizona data center with the aluminum shaving cement as a heat sink. On 110deg days, with the surface dirt in direct sunlight reading 135deg, the temperature at 10ft deep was still 60-65deg. It's a very cheap eco friendly motorized chiller alternative that can save huge amounts of money when done on large scales. This perticular datacenter is using a ground loop system to absorb over 4 million watts of energy continously. Ground loops save many hundreds of thousands of dollars in power every year. If they are installed correctly, they are essentially a no maintence no fussing system with a working life of 20+years."