When do you need a chiller?

[DaTouSteve]

Hello fellow reefers,

After a 4 year hiatus from reefkeeping due to law school and work, I'm finally an attorney (yay!) and am eager to start another tank. I still remember the joys I had setting up the tank. Brainstorming, planning, and then finally executing it out was probably the most satisfying part of reefkeeping for me.

I'd like to set up a tank in my office at work. I'm leaning between a 12 gallon cube that I can put on my desk or a 30ish gallon I can put up against the wall.

My office is pretty optimal for a tank because there is no natural light coming into the office. However, I am concerned about the temperatures in the office over the weekend. I've been working weekends the past 3 weeks and the temperature in the office is normally 80 degrees over the weekend because they shut off the A/C.

For those of you with tanks in the office, should I be concerned about this? At this point, I'm in the planning stage of things and would like to know if I would need a chiller to set this up properly. Or if you have other suggestions/solutions, I would love to hear them. I've been out of reefkeeping for about 4 years so I'm sure there's plenty of advancements that I am not aware of. I still remember few years back on hot days over the summer, I would dump ice cubes into the sump to keep tank temps down.

P.S. I forgot my login and thus have created a new account.

 

[Anonymous]

:welcome:

Congrats on finishing school! Well, you need a chiller when the temp begins to effect the tank (obvious I know) but you can minimize that by say using a hanging pendant light as opposed to a closed cover that puts a lot of heat into the water. Also, if you use an automatic freshwater top off system you can point a standing fan at the tank and use evaporation to dissipate the heat. Or, you can set the lights to go on later in the early evening and use a shorter photoperiod on the weekends. I'm sure others have more suggestions.

The chillers nowadays work really well if that's how you need to go, but you do need to preplan for them and incorporate that into the overall scheme of things.

 

[Anonymous]

You might be able to get away without a chiller. You could set the tank up and get it running to see what temp. the water reaches on the hot days, and then make your plan. Lawdawg had a great suggestion with the evaporative cooling. It works very well.

And it's not exactly ideal, but you could run a reef tank that hit highs of 85-86. There are many corals that can handle that. But you'd be left with a smaller safety net if any of the other parameters went awry.

So what part of China are you in?

欢迎回来