Hot weather makes things very stressful

Hey everyone, I've been gone for a long time, but I am still alive and so are my newts. I, however, just had total hip replacement surgery, so I have been quite a bit predisposed. It was only last month, but it was real hard leaving my newts in my girlfriends care for a week in the middle of summer. I live in Bellingham, Washington, and way up here we don't really prepare for hot weather, and man it has been hot.

Every am its 80 in the tank at about 9 am. I put in icepacks all day(which I am grateful to be around to do) but the temp stays at about 80F until 11pm. As a result, I rarely see my taricha of my c.o's. I see him come out often, sometimes he crawls under or on top the icepack, I had my male firebelly do that too last week. Now they are not really coming out to eat or anything, just hiding in their cave on land. Should I get rid of this so they have to go in the cool water? I think they should be in the water and not hiding in a hot cave, even if it is dark. Any ideas, they usually never miss a meal!

Oh yeah, and I do have java moss that the taricha hid in today, and alot of other natural spots in the shallow to deep regions.

C.O's take quite a hot summer in the wild (see previous my posts). When water temperature heads towards 30C (86F) C.O's tend to become more land based. They tend to burrow in the mud, under leaves and logs etc. We are still investigating why this happens.

The taricha will probably do things differently, but I do not know much about them.

At http://www.caudata.org/forum/cgi-bin/show.cgi?tpc=8&post=60480#POST60480 I have described my solution. Look at the whole thread. There are some good suggestions. Since posting that last message I have moved the tank down low to the floor but still under the AC unit. I use a piece of metal to deflect the Ac air down a bit so that the fans can suck in some cool stuff. It isn't perfect. Even with all this, the water sometimes goes to 24 but can usually hover around 21-23 despite the AC being set to 18C. I guess you can't be too scientific when nature is against you. Good luck!