Hot day's and Nano tanks!!! Keep an eye at your tanks temperature!!!

[thakki]

So I never had a nano in summer...last winter I had setup my first 24 nano and had no clue (or didn't foresee...) what a hot day can do to a small tank...yesterday evening I saw my corals didn't open up as they usually do and I thought something was wrong with my water parameters...waited another hr or so and noticed that all of them were unusually retracted and all my soft corals were struggling...then it occurred to me...immediately checked the temperature (I dont have a controller on that tank...thought didn't need it...but now considering one) and found that it was 86+ degrees!!! Didn't know what to do...turned off the heater and lights...luckily had 2.5 gallons of fresh saltwater...did a water change...but still didn't make much of a difference...the temp came down to 84F and hovered around that for some time...I had no option other than increasing the AC and picking up couple of ice packs that I had in my fridge and dumping them in the sump part of the tank...slowly the temp came down to 83F. Meanwhile I filled up couple of bottles of tank water and put it in fridge...for the next few hrs...I repeated this and finally before I went to bed the temp came down to 81. I couldnt do much...this morning I woke up and found the temp to be 79F. Now I am worried about the corals...they dont seem that happy and my fish seem okay but not sure...this was a lesson learned in a very hard way. 

 

Are there any chillers for the nano's...saw a couple like IceProbe...but they dont seem to do much just few degrees below the room temp...and that too drill a hole in the tank!!! Any other ideas to bring the temp down or control it in hot days?

[Origami]

I used to use a JBJ Arctica chiller that I purchased used here for a 29 gallon Biocube that I had a few years back. I needed it for just the reason that you're describing. It worked great and a few years later, when I took that tank down, I sold the chiller for just about the amount that I'd paid for it. I don't know anything about the IceProbes and how well they'll match your needs.

[John]

As a temp solution, submerge a ziplock bag of ice / ice pack to bring down temps...

[Keraxis]

Fan blowing on top of water is your friend on small tanks

[thakki]

I used to use a JBJ Arctica chiller that I purchased used here for a 29 gallon Biocube that I had a few years back. I needed it for just the reason that you're describing. It worked great and a few years later, when I took that tank down, I sold the chiller for just about the amount that I'd paid for it. I don't know anything about the IceProbes and how well they'll match your needs.

 

 

Have to look into that chiller. 

[thakki]

As a temp solution, submerge a ziplock bag of ice / ice pack to bring down temps...

 

Tried the ice pack...good idea on the ziplock bag full of ice.

[thakki]

Fan blowing on top of water is your friend on small tanks

 

I was wondering about the same...will a fan on top work. 

[Origami]

I was wondering about the same...will a fan on top work. 

It's worth a try.

 

If the tank is at a higher temperature than the room, then a fan can offer a lot of hope. However, if the room is already hot (meaning at a higher temperature than you want your tank to run at), then there will be competing forces at work. It's all about energy.

 

Evaporation can pull off as much as 8,500 kJ (kilojoules) of energy for every gallon evaporated. But the surrounding environment will, if warmer, be adding energy right back into the tank. Increasing evaporation in a 30 gallon tank by 1/8 gallon per day can drop a 30-gallon tank by 4 degrees F if you didn't have to fight the energy input from the surrounding environment (from submerged pumps, lights, conducted heat from the room, etc). Evaporation was a great solution for tanks back when we used hot lights (like metal halides and even T5's under a hood) because the rooms were generally cooler and what we were trying to do was to increase the rate of cooling to compensate for the rate that these heat sources were adding it. 

 

So it's worth giving it a try this weekend if you're able and, if it doesn't work, you may have to consider a different approach. 

[Origami]

Another thing that might be worth consideration is moving the tank to a cooler location in the house - one with less sun, perhaps, if that's what's driving the temperature.