Need to make a Chiller Tonight - help!

[NancyFreer]

Hello I am new to the forum...

my name is Nancy. I have a 90 gallon tropical aquarium and my 90 gallon tropical aquarium is in trouble!

Our air conditioner is broken. We opted not to pay for emergency air conditioner service ($150 per hour) Our air conditioner has been running sporadically for 3 days, Our service tech has been out to service our unit 3 times but it finally went down tonight -- 95 degrees in our house!

I have fans running on my filters, a fan blowing on the tank and this will be my 3rd night staying up all night to put filtered ice in the tank every half hour. The tank is at 84 degrees now -- I'm doing everything I can think of to keep it from going any higher!

I am at my wits end! I need to rent a CHILLER from someone, or make a chiller out of parts I purchase from Walmart tonight!

Please help me, local fish friends!

I don't know if I'm allowed to post my cell phone -- I dont' want to get booted off this forum for breaking a major rule right off the bat!

I can access email via my droid -- my email is
nancy@azfunfaces.com

Please HELP me if you have any ideas that I can use -- I'm in the loop for service repair with Acutemp between 8 am - 12 noon tomorrow.

It's gonna be a LONG night -- but I gotta do everything I can to keep my fish safe!

Thank you and hope to hear from someone(s) tonight

Nancy Freer
local fish friend

[captjab]

Maybe put more fans or a bigger fan blowing across the water surface to increase evaporation.
The other option would be to make a coil out of vinyl aquarium hose in a cooler of ice water with a small water pump hooked to it coming out of your aquarium and returning much cooler water. The slower the pump or a long coil would make it more effective.
Good luck.

[RG21]

Freeze some bottles of water and rotate them. When the temp gets too low your heater will kick on. Just make sure the ice is sealed in bottles so it doesn't mess up your salinity. I did this all summer long before I bought my chiller and it worked fine. You just have to freeze many bottles, be able to switch them throughout the until your a/c is fixed. I think this will be the cheapest way to go

[Snakebyt]

freeze some bottles of water and rotate them. When the temp gets too low your heater will kick on. Just make sure the ice is sealed in bottles so it doesn't mess up your salinity. I did this all summer long before i bought my chiller and it worked fine. You just have to freeze many bottles, be able to switch them throughout the until your a/c is fixed. I think this will be the cheapest way to go


+1

[Crusinjimbo]

Two liter soda bottles filled with tap water, capped and frozen worked for me. Just rotated them between the freezer and the sump or tank.

[Digitalelectric]

I had this happen a while back and made an overly intricate chiller. I took a lot of tubing and a pump. Attached the tubing to the pump, put it in a large container full of ice water. Then ran the tubing like ac coils in the sump and returned back to the container. So it was like an actual AC coil setup. The advantage to this was I could be at work all day without having to replace frozen bottles of water. It actually worked quite well.

[sslak]

Frozen ziploc bags of ice works great too.

Simple and easy.

[joeogio]

Hello I am new to the forum...

my name is Nancy. I have a 90 gallon tropical aquarium and my 90 gallon tropical aquarium is in trouble!

Our air conditioner is broken. We opted not to pay for emergency air conditioner service ($150 per hour) Our air conditioner has been running sporadically for 3 days, Our service tech has been out to service our unit 3 times but it finally went down tonight -- 95 degrees in our house!

I have fans running on my filters, a fan blowing on the tank and this will be my 3rd night staying up all night to put filtered ice in the tank every half hour. The tank is at 84 degrees now -- I'm doing everything I can think of to keep it from going any higher!

I am at my wits end! I need to rent a CHILLER from someone, or make a chiller out of parts I purchase from Walmart tonight!

Please help me, local fish friends!

I don't know if I'm allowed to post my cell phone -- I dont' want to get booted off this forum for breaking a major rule right off the bat!

I can access email via my droid -- my email is
nancy@azfunfaces.com

Please HELP me if you have any ideas that I can use -- I'm in the loop for service repair with Acutemp between 8 am - 12 noon tomorrow.

It's gonna be a LONG night -- but I gotta do everything I can to keep my fish safe!

Thank you and hope to hear from someone(s) tonight

Nancy Freer
local fish friend




heres what I would do depending on how far away your tank is to the closest window. I would go to Walmart and buy a window ac unit and crank that baby up till you ac gets fixed. then you could just re sale it on Craigslist when you get done.



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[CRC88]

Freeze some bottles of water and rotate them. When the temp gets too low your heater will kick on. Just make sure the ice is sealed in bottles so it doesn't mess up your salinity. I did this all summer long before I bought my chiller and it worked fine. You just have to freeze many bottles, be able to switch them throughout the until your a/c is fixed. I think this will be the cheapest way to go

+1

I think this is the best way to go. No reason to get fancy as this will work fine. If you're paranoid about them leaking, just use some RO/DI water to fill the bottles so that way if they leak, nothing bad will get into the tank. But a rotation of 4-6 bottles would work great.

Also, keep in mind that while the high temp is damaging, temperature swings can be equally as damaging. I think with 90g of water, these will be somewhat limited due to the large volume, but if you were to fluctuate between 78 and 84 every day, I would argue it would just be better to keep it at 84 until you can slowly lower your temp to 78-80. Good luck!