The beauty of unintended good planning

By Mark van der Wal on Jul 14, 2012

This summer has been unusually warm across the US, brutally hot, actually. My area of the Southeast was recently hit with a triple digit heat wave. Around the same time, my air conditioner decided to break. Needless to say, my first concern was the reef aquariums.

At my old house, I didn’t have a basement or LED lights. I had my sumps inside the stands of the tanks, and used internal return pumps. My lighting was T5 fluorescent and metal halides. When I had AC issues at the old house, keeping the aquarium temperature down was quite the emergency. The return pump and halides dumped heat into the tank, and the elevated room temps didn’t help either. I usually resorted to killing the lights, and adding ziploc bags full of ice, but this time around good planning led to some nice unintended consequences.

Fast forward to the house I live in now. I upgraded to an oversized sump in the basement with an external return pump. I also ditched the metal halides for LED. When the AC unit broke down a few weeks ago, the usual panic ensued. But to my surprise, the tank temps held up fine. The naturally cool basement kept the sump cool and buffered the tank temperature. The LEDs and external return pump didn’t really add any heat to the tank either. So while my house air temp was elevated to 88 degrees, the tank stayed within acceptable range.

It was a huge relief and luckily the AC problem was a simple and cheap fix. Looking over everything, I realize the tank was inadvertently designed to withstand such an obstacle(for a short while). The biggest help was probably the oversized sump in the chilled basement. Even if I had Metal Halides, I could have opted to leave them off for a few days. Even though nothing in my setup was specifically chosen to combat the summer heat, I’m going to pretend I had the forethought to anticipate AC issues. It makes me look smarter than I am. Yup. Yeah. I meant to do that.

Have you had good aquarium design lead to unintended consequences? If so please share in the comments.

XD_1

FYI, adding ice to the tank will not make a difference in temperature for more than a few minutes — usually a small fan pointed over an open top will make a bigger difference and hold it indefinitely.

I once had a boss who wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box and didn’t believe this when I did the math for him so I did a demonstration on a 75g with a small clip-on fan versus two 20 lb bags of ice.
Blair Mrachek

but cooling with a fan is fairly dependent upon room temperature. Here in South Florida, if you’re A/C goes out and the room quickly rises to about 90*, a fan won’t be much help. Sure it will keep your tank from getting even hotter, but evaporative cooling can only do so much. Over the years, I’ve had to resort to the ice method a few times because fans weren’t doing anything other than keeping my tank at 88* instead of getting to 90*. It’s like having a chiller. Even if you have a chiller, but the room it’s in is 90*, the chiller won’t be nearly as effective as it would be in a cooler room. I always try the fan thing first, but sometimes I have no choice other than using bags of ice, even though it is a complete PITA.
XD_1

Air temperature has less to do with it than humidity (or the wet-bulb temperature if we want to get specific). Even in a humid climate where evaporation is difficult, putting a dehumidifier in the same room as the tank for the duration of the heat wave will be more effective than ice.
JakeAdams

Great story Mark, perfect read for my saturday morning coffee
http://www.facebook.com/people/António-Vitor/100001304930327 António Vitor

I was surprised how I handle (my body not the tank) the big houtbreak of heat in Europe (reached 47ºC in some areas), just sweating, without any A.C.
sweating is just the same thing.
http://www.facebook.com/people/António-Vitor/100001304930327 António Vitor

You just had to buy better fans, or you should put the fans blowing to a bigger surface.
With one single 50W fan and with 35ºC ambiente temperture it can sustain a 100 gallon tank in the 27ºC. The AC principle is not that diferent from the fan blowing the water…

In Portugal it is dry in the summer, so it’s VERY EASY to sustain low temperatures, usually hot comes with dryness of the air…in a humid place you could have more problems driving the temperature down.

Wet-bulb temperature is where you can drive the temperature down like XD_1 said…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

some evaporation towers (in nuclear plant) using the same principle. Yes it can efficiently drive the temperature of the water down to safe zone….even in nuclear plants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower
http://www.facebook.com/people/António-Vitor/100001304930327 António Vitor

Don’t know Why I received a negative score on this post…maybe it was my lausy english or something… what you did not understand or agree? at least say something….. Blowing air in some situations is more eficient than even any chiller, it’s for sure more eficiente than the AC equipment, if what we want is low temperature in the tank. Of course dry air is imperative. this doesn’t function in regions with a high moisture in the air.
http://www.facebook.com/people/António-Vitor/100001304930327 António Vitor

with refrigerators or AC or whatever, the liquid inside the little tubes (where we want to cool) evaporates and draws the heat with it. then the gás condensates (in a different zone, we might need a fan here…lol…) it needs a motor or pump to return that liquid where we want to “make” cool. it’s the same principle, but the water goes away. the liquid used in AC and refrigerator evaporates at lower temperatures much lower, so we gain efficiency, but we need motors to recirculate that substance, no need with water, in some ocasions fans can be more efficient. of course pc fans drawing 0.15W are not enough…
http://www.facebook.com/people/Ryan-Reeves/1555916536 Ryan Reeves

Welcome to the world of modified geothermal reefing!
http://www.facebook.com/christopher.conti Chris Conti

Great
Blair Mrachek

having to add a dehumidifier to the mix makes the ice method look a little better than before. Two 6″ Air King fans struggled to keep my 46g bowfront from getting above 83* when the A/C & room temperature was 75*, so there is absolutely no way I am going to believe that adding even more fans will be able to keep my tank from getting above 83* when the ambient temperature is above 90*. The reason I won’t believe it is because I have tried it before when I lost power for 4 weeks after Hurricane Wilma. I (and lots of other local hobbyists in the same position) tried everything to not have to use the ice method, but I had to. If I had LEDs, just like the tank this article is about, fans alone might have been enough (it definitely would have been pushing the limit of acceptable temperature ranges), but I had halides & T5′s and fans simply were not enough. I now have a small (20″ cube) aquarium that has LEDs that never gets above 77* and find it hard to believe that if the power goes out and it’s greater than 90*F and humidity is above 80% that fans alone will be able to keep my tank from getting below 80* (the tank never gets above 77* so if it gets up to 83*, my acros probably won’t be too happy) . Maybe it would, but I highly doubt it.
Mike

I have to ask, how much of a height are you pumping from your basement? While yeah it may have helped in this situation, pumping 24/7/365 with a high energy using pump might be more expensive in the long run than having a chiller that only runs in these emergencies when your AC dies.

Not to mention while yeah it’s cool in the basement, that means your heaters need to work that much more due to the temperature differential. I know for a fact my tank grinds through much more juice when it’s cooler, as the whole tank isn’t in a climate controlled area. One reason why I want to build an insulated “in-wall” around the tank, so I can keep that column of air the same temp as the tank as a result not have to heat as much.
Mark van der Wal

I’m confused. I wasn’t expressing my tank as energy efficient. A basement sump is most definitely not as efficient. The pump is a pan world ps-150, which equates to about 190-watts. I have the sump elevated on a DIY stand to reduce head pressure. I’m probably looking at 12-feet vertically. You are right, that I need more energy to heat it in winter, and my return pump sucks more juice than the internal Eheim I used to run. The point of my post was unintended benefits from a plan with different goals. I moved the sump to the basement to increase my filtration real estate, and most importantly reduce noise. I hate noise. An in-stand sump is way more efficient, but the noise and constrained space bothered me. Meanwhile, the LED’s were a move to energy efficiency. I went from 1000-watts to 300-watts. I may have to heat the tank more in winter, but I still believe the 700-watt savings year-round outweighed that electrical demand. My sump gets insulated with styrofoam panels in winter. I live in Georgia, so my basement isn’t freezing really. 90% of it is finished and climate controlled. The unfinished room with sump stays in the mid 60′s in winter, and low 70′s in summer. Anyways, these changes had the unexpected benefit of helping me through a stressful AC outage.
Mark van der Wal

That said, my tank uses less electricity in total that most people allocate in wattage for lighting alone.
skunkmere

wow you got 5 of those leds fixtures, that must have cost a ton,
XD_1

That’s the problem with the new Disqus — there are a lot of people out there who will downvote for little or no reason.
Mike

Mark: I apologize if my post sounded overly like a critique, that wasn’t my point. I understood what your post was about, I was just mentioning what I did mostly for others who think that would be an way to combat heat but not understand the consequences (energy) of doing so.
Mark van der Wal

I see where you are coming from. An idle chiller would definitely be a more efficient solution.
http://www.facebook.com/people/António-Vitor/100001304930327 António Vitor

For the lighting I use free electricity, I use two large dedicated photovoltaic panels (DIY leds with 250W)… (3*1.5) meters.
I even have some pumps connected to this “free” system., it can endure for many days without electricity, the best UPS system I come about. maybe I can even sustain corals without any electricity for at least 1 month. In the daylight I light the tank, at night it’s off to preserve the batteries, my vortech is connected to the batteries, but only draws from the batteries if there is not electrical power in the house.
http://www.facebook.com/people/António-Vitor/100001304930327 António Vitor

I even have some pumps connected to this “free” system., it can endure for many days without electricity, the best UPS system I come about. maybe I can even sustain corals without any electricity for at least 1 month.

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