Simple break through
Well, first... This is officially my 5,000 post. Yay, I'm officially a talk-to-much.Of course that puts Ace in a category all of his own.
Just kidding.
Hey, had a huge break through.
As you know, or may not, I run a single 150, two 250 and a single 400 metal halide over my tank. I have a 1 horse power chiller to keep water parameters in the green. I've played around with 80, then 79, then 78, now I'm back to 79. That chiller was firing up every ten minutes or so and generating so much heat that my fish room was unbearable after a few minutes unless I was shoulder deep in the drink.
Frustrated I placed a high flow fan by the chiller in an effort to move some of that energy out of the area... and let the chiller breath.
No love.
I went to HD and picked up some hose insulation to cover my return lines. It didn't make sense to pull the heat from the water to the chiller to the lines that ran behind the chiller back to my DT. Of course, I never got around to putting the insulation on... just didn't feel like doing anything. Wife tells me I'm lazy, I disagree.
I put the fan over the sump to assist with evaporative heat loss. Still wasn't scratching that itch as my chiller was on and off and on and off and on and off and there I was looking at my tank from the doorway because I don't care for the warm weather.
Well, last week I threw a tantrum. I said, "Dagnabbit! I'm upset! Really upset!" I then, in a fit of moderate anger.... more of a mollified sullen attitude... took the fan from beneath the tank, propped it against the wall behind the tank and angled it to the surface of the water.
What a change!
In the morning my chiller's heater is on, water temp is at 77. During the day it hovers around 78-79. I can now walk into the fish room without feeling like I'm in a suana. It is awesome. Doesn't look good... but I can deal with that. The tank room is now habitable. Gloria was wearing a jacket yesterday when she went in there.
On the flip side, my frag tank isn't doing so hot. Too low of a water turn over is causing a lot of algae to grow in there. I can't bump it up because my overflow area is already tapped out for flow. I was thinking of turning it into an algae growing area. Dragons breath seems to be growing real well in there. I'm sure I'm getting some benefit from having it set up, just not doing much in the area of frags at the moment.
Next post I will post a photo for you photo hungry guys.
Multi-Genera
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