Overheated, please help

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Jimbo7

Aquarium Advice Addict
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
1,996
Location
Minneapolis, MN
Due to the warm weather lately my tank temperature today spiked to 87 or 88 degrees while i was at work. This includes my frag tank. Is there anything i can do besides cool the tank to help them? I dont have any water mixed though im going to now.
 
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Ok first you want to make sure that your heaters are not stuck on and heating the tank. You may want to put a fan near the tank and let it blow on it. If your lights are on timers I would suggest reducing the amount of time they are on during the hottest part of the day. If you see your tank temp going up like that the first thing to check is always the heater. Sometimes they just go nuts and stay on all the time. Second thing to look at is your lighting. Turn the lights off it the tank is too warm.

Doesn't your 90 have a canopy on it? Do you have fans in there to pull the heat from the lights out? IF you don't I would add some fans!
 
An air conditioner pointed at the tank would help. leave the top off with a fan blowing on it? or Buy a chiller. Thats really it that I know of.

And how does your RO water get rained in don't you have a lid for it to prevent anything from contaminating it?
 
I keep my tank at 88. A fan blowing across the top along with the house AC keeps it there. Anytime the outside temp goes above 78 I need to turn the AC on to keep the tank from overheating.
 
I have no A/C. With a 10" fan blowing directly on the water, a bubble wall in the back (yes, I know it looks tacky, but it's for the tank's health) and lights not coming on until the heat of the day is past, I can keep the tank 10 degrees cooler than ambient temperature through evaporative cooling. With a saltwater tank you'd want to rig up an auto-topoff to go with that so you don't have other side effects.

The bubble wall has a secondary effect of very quick gas exchange. Even though I'm not running a fast-growth tank, my plants sometimes pearl due to the super-saturation of gasses in the water from my bubble wall.

I currently have a Neptune Systems AquaController Jr on order to further control situation. I don't really trust my heater thermostat, and I'd like the fan and bubble curtian to automatically cycle on/off as needed.
 
I thought that was a typo as well but I read the post again and I guess it is the upper limits being pushed....
 
As stated above a fan will do the job. Might not look that great like Dskidmore said but it will get the job done.
 
Got to be a typo. I doubt Cmor would purposely keep his tank temp that high.

I have no problem keeping my tank at 80-81 with 3 175w mh's in my canopy, even without AC. I have 3 fans in my canopy and a clip-on fan blowing over my sump in the basement.
The only issue I came across was the unbearable humidity in the basement. I had to set up a dehumidifier. So now I evaporate about 3 gal/day from my tank, plus the dehumidifier in the basement pulls about 1.5-2 gals/day out of the air. The AC keeps the humidity down upstairs.
 
FFS (fat finger syndrome) strikes again. My tank remains at a stable 78 degrees +/- .5 degree.

I used to keep it at 80, but for what ever reason dropped it down when I was adjusting a new heater.
 
i put fans all over it and the temp has been slowly dropping since last night, its cooler out today so im hoping i wont have to worry about it. This weekend we are going to rig up some sort of cooling system. As of right now nothing looks too bad, all polyps are open and other expanded. so we will see how it goes. Thanks for all the help guys!
 
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