Tank won't cool!

kaikoga · Jul 10, 2013

Because of the summer heat I have been struggling to keep my tank cool. I have a 20 gal with two axolotls and it has stayed in the 70-73 temp range for weeks. The temperature in my house is only 70, and yet the temperature in my tank right now is 70.9! I have the tank on the floor in order for it to be a bit cooler, and i have a fan blowing directly onto the surface of the water. I recently bought the ZooMed Aqua Cool aquarium fan but that didn't seem to have much of an effect either. The axies seem to be fine, neither seem stressed and they are eating normally. I don't know how my tank would be warmer than the rest of my house when it's on the ground and has a fan blowing on it!!

TheRoyalOctopus · Jul 10, 2013

We're having a horrible heat wave in the UK. My temps been rising. So I put ice in a bag and let it float in the tank for a bit. Similar though, you can put a bottle of water in the freezer then let that float in the water until the temp is down

Hope this helps?

kaikoga · Jul 10, 2013

Thanks, I had heard about that method but I wasn't sure because I'd also heard that it will make the temp fluctuate too rapidly and stress your axolotls. Will it work if I keep one bottle in the freezer and one in the tank and switch them out whenever i need to?

Possum63 · Jul 10, 2013

Hello

My flatmate and I used to floated ice bottle method back in summer (It's winter for us at the moment) and it worked okay but we ended up with a freezer full of bottles in order to have enough frozen ones to rotate. Lucky I had a spare freezer I wasn't using! (Obviously it takes longer to freeze than it did for the bottle to defrost so two bottles isn't anywhere near enough).

We used about 1.5 litre bottles for a 90 liter tank and would swap the bottles about every four hours in order to keep the temp from fluctuating too much.

It does work this method but it is a lot of work and does require a fair amount of freezer space as well as your time to be consistent with bottle swaps.

kaikoga · Jul 10, 2013

Thanks a lot for the info! We have a spare freezer as well so I'll try that method. I also switched fans and repositioned them which helped bring the temp down to 69F. I will start freezing bottles tonight

Dolores · Jul 10, 2013

My tank was getting very hot as well so I went to a computer store and picked up these 12v 80mm fans for $2.99 each. I connected all of the molex connectors and soldered the power cables of an adapter to an extra molex connector and plugged it in to the fans and it worked! You could probably get away with using electrical tape. The adapter I am using is 12v and 150mA so the fans aren't spinning at full speed but they still made a 5 Fahrenheit difference. You could also try to use a 120mm fan which spins slower but displaces much more air and runs almost silent.

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Tank won't cool!

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