DIY chiller

I posted a link a while back to a website where a guy tried this and documented the results. They were not very good - I think he was able to lower the temperature by 4 degrees F. Not worth the effort IMO.

Still, it's fun to talk about it.

Point me at the link kind sir. The aquarium stand I am finishing up was designed with the little Haier dorm fridge that Wal-Mart sells in mind. If someone has already tried the dorm fridge idea, I'd sure love to read about it before I spent any money.


Thanks!

Here's a brief and incomplete survey of DIY cooling methods I have seen discussed at length:

1) Evaporative (various schemes)
2) Thermally mediated (e.g. coils buried in ground)
3) Peltier junction
4) Dorm fridge
5) Window A/C

All of these have significant drawbacks (usually they don't work very well).

To this mix I would like to add to the following:

Tie-in to home A/C (central A/C unit). This is how they cool the tanks at the MS Museum of Natural Science - they have their tank coolers tied into their A/C units. HOW exactly, I don't know. In my home the cooling coils are located in the inside unit in the A/C return. Seems like one could put their tank cooling coil in there...you would need to insulate the tubing that runs to and from the aquarium.

I just took my "dorm fridge" chiller apart. I was using it for a two months when I noticed that the water was getting warm. I checked out the problem, and the thing is the plastic tubing that is used to run the water from the tank to the copper inside the fridge was getting too clogged with algae and slime. The water wasn't even pushing through the tubing anymore. The plastic tubes leaving and entering the fridge became totally coroded and clogged. The little bit of plastic tubing that was in the fridge also froze up. Ended up not working so well. Took the pump off the tubing and am using it now as a great riffle-maker.

Don't underestimate the power of pumps to add heat to the tank.
I onced tried a "nano reef" tank in which I thought using a huge pump to turnover the tank volume umpteen times per hour would help water quality issues in the small tank.
Worked fine for awhile till we went away for the weekend in the summer and left the room AC off.
Came home to one stinky $1000.00 tank of fish soup. Room temps were in the 80s but water temps were in the 90s. I lost everything.