Ice packs to chill tank in summer?
 

I keep coming home from days on the water to find my temperature climb, so far my display tank has been as high as 84. Lost my Setosa but no big deal. Started throwing ice cubes in the tank to cool it off but that affects salinity and I don't use filtered water to make ice cubes, so instead I started using those plastic sealed ice packs used for coolers, take out of freezer, turn off ATO, drop ice pack in , wait for it to melt completely, remove ice pack turn ATO back on, rinse ice pack, put back in freezer, repeat... It works

Yes I could use a chiller, or make a DiY chiller but I like the simplicity of using ice packs, the freezer is running anyway right. Sounds pretty economical.

I just started freezing a large ziploc with 4 cups of water and will be putting that in a tank volume of 45 gallons. I use a Digital Aquatics controller so it should give a pretty accurate tank temp change before and after. Will post results later on.

Anyone else do this? And is there any calculations that someone knows of in figuring out how many cups of water worth of ice will chill a certain number of gallons by a certain number of degrees.

Freeze some water bottles and float them but take some water out so they don't burst in the freezer of course.

Those cooler freezer packs would worry me. What's in there anyway. Whatever it is I don't want it leaking from a cheap manufacturer seal.

Or that, same idea as above :) but ziploc freezer bags won't burst

Probably a calculation somewhere, but would include water temp, ice temp, air temp, surface areas of those parameters. Not something you work out in your head. Trial and error, unfortunately.

i threw in about 10 water bottles (didn't drain any water and they never burst in my freezer). took about 2F off my tank temp and quite fast too. took about 10 min for ~ 130 gallons. too fast for my liking and my hot main floor (29C) raised the temp back up in less than an hour. a fan on the display is a better idea i was just too lazy to set one up.

I use 2 2 liter bottles fill almost to the top but leaving enough for expansion. Toss it in when needed and also 2 fans hooked up to my profilux set at desired temperature on and off when its cool enough, lately they have been the work horse of the tank, always on. I don't care about the temperature drop as if it gets too low my heater will kick on.

I bought a clip on fan from Rona for $14 and so far my highest temp during this heat wave has been 81.4 degrees. That little fan on my 125 takes a few degrees off for sure and it's easier than having to do the ice thing I did for years in my 55...

I bought those too and the dame shaft keep on popping out and hit the shield, I am going back to claim warranty again...:mad:

+1 works great with the controller (set in chiller mode) on both tanks.

I guess I'll trial and error the ice packs in the next couple days, good idea using the fan on the controller but the only reason I haven't done that is it's based on evaporative cooling which will raise the humidity in the house. I live in a 1 floor house with literally zero air flow when the house is locked up, I don't even have a fan above the stove or in the bathroom.

There must be many variables to this as well, but is there an approx amount of additional top off water I could expect to use when running a fan 24 hours a day. Going camping next weekend for 4 days so will most likely be using a fan. Currently the tank in reference (45 gallons of water) uses a 5 gallon bucket of water every 5 days. So that's 1 gallon per day. If it raises my top-off water use by much I'll need a larger bucket