reef kooler

[eric]

I've been contemplating building my own little cooling tower or swamp cooler for the tank - or at least use the concept.

I figure I can lower the tank temp one of four ways, remove heat sources, use mechanical cooling (chiller), water changes or evaporation. Since my livelyhood is based on evaporation of water (and it's the most reasonable means for cooling a tank IMO) I decided to try and make the most of it.

The concept is simply increasing the water surface area in contact with an airflow. Surface area helps evaporate water and the air flow carries it away.

What I built was a small version of a cooling tower in acrylic. The water from my overflow will enter a small distribution box on the top of this. It has holes that will spread the water out a little. The water drains onto a fill media. I used fill for cooling towers, but I figure I could have used eggcrate, bioballs, or anything to splash the water as it goes through.

A fan is mounted on one end (at an angle to try and avoid soaking it) pointed straight into the fill. The opposite end has louvers to allow the moist air to exit, sloped to avoid water from pouring out. And the rest of the water drains into my sump - in theory cooler than it left the tank.

I built it tonight and will let it cure until testing it. I'll try and report water differences incoming and outgoing.

[NaCl_H2O]

It will help, but not sure it will do it all? I did something very similar about 2 years ago on my 125g. I was able to pull down about 1-2 degrees, evaporation was HUGE and humidity in the house was very high!

Good luck, let us know how it works?

[eric]

Overall it works as I expected almost too good. On Friday I had a inside humidity of just over 60% when I started it.

I first had the fan on a 9V DC power and it didn't have enough power to force the air through well. At 12 V DC, it was much better, albeit significantly more noisy. But it dropped the temp down a degree in an hour.

Later in the weekend, with a humidity of 30%, it dropped the temp two degrees in less than an hour. At this rate, that's faster than I want to change the temp.

I don't have the fan hooked up to a temperature controller right now.

The cooler just splashing water through it keeps up fairly well, but the temp still rises slowly during the day (low humidity levels).

My real problem is the fan is too close to the splashing water and will get wet if the fan isn't running. So I have to modify the design to pull the fan a little further out for protection. I'm also going to try a middle range speed to cut down on the noise.

Being only a 55 gallon, it's not really evaporating so much as to really alter the humidity levels in the house any more than having the tanks in the first place. I'm not conrecned with high evaporation rates, as that's what I wanted in the first place. And if it's not making a noticable difference in humidity in the room, then I'm right where I wanted to be.