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Originally Posted by doch
Hey GuySmiley... do you know for a fact that this won't work or are you just working on theory here? I think that the trick to this DIY is to have a LOT of tubing coiled up as much as possible in the fridge so that the warm water passing through has as much time as possible to be in the cold environment to chill. It seems to work in my head, but if you know that it won't work from experience let me know.
Geopod: I KNOW!!! Greatest idea EVER!!! Hopefully it works when I do it. Worst case scenario I guess will be that I have a beer fridge beside the couch... oh well. The unfortunate part if it doesn't work will be that there will be siliconed holes in the top of the fridge... that's why we have plants I guess... to cover the hole... lol
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Geopod and Doch
try this for a test before you start drilling holes into your fridge.
1) plug in your fridge and put it to the highest coldest setting.
2) get a 5 gallon bucket with a small power head and a heater that will keep the temp at the highest you want to see your tank at (i set my chiller to turn on at 83-84 degrees F)
3) stick it into the beer fridge with the small powerhead running to circulate the water and the heater on to continue heating the water
4) put in a thermometer or the probe of one of those thermometers with a long probe (for outdoor temp)
5) calculate how long it will take for the 5 gallons of water to be cooled down to the temperature you wish to maintain with the heater and powerhead plugged in. (in the summer i am happy with 81-82 degrees)
This test will simulate two things:
1) a heat source (metal halides on your tank or ambient room temperature in reality compared to the heater in the bucket in the test)
2) circulating water (water being pumped through the pipes in reality compared to the powerhead in the test)
3) a body of water that needs to be cooled (your tank water in reality compared to the bucket of water in the test)
IF the fridge can cool the water down to 81-82 for 5 gallons of water, note down the time that it took to accomplish that.
THEN divide the volume of your tank by 5 (for five gallons of water) and that will give you a VERY vague idea how long it will take for the fridge to cool down your tank.
Although this is probably not the most accurate test that you can do, it will give you a general idea why it will not work which are the exact reasons that GuySmiley had indicated in his post.
HOWEVER for the same reasons that GuySmiley had stated, I think the following method MIGHT work because it will be a static body of standing water. I haven't personally tried this, but i did give it some thought before I kicked myself in the head, woke up and I did a completely different DIY chiller.
1) get the biggest and flexible plastic rubbermaid container that will fit into your fridge with the door closed of course
2) fill the container with salt water (lower freezing point)
3) run the tubings through the fridge and coil the tubing inside the rubbermaid container. Limit the amount of tubing (ie 30% tubing volume, 70% water volume) in the container and make sure the tubing is submerged in the water
4) turn the fridge on the highest setting to the point that you can freeze as much of the water in the container as possible
5) make sure you have two pumps on the tubing (small one thats on constantly to keep water moving inside and big second pump thats on a thermostat to turn on when heats too high)
I thought maybe if you are pumping warm tank water through the tubing thats inside a body of water that close to freezing that the tank can be cooled through the process of heat transfer. The icy water in the rubbermaid will eventually warm up but there is a larger volume of water that is at around freezing point that will require a lot of heat transfer to bring it to the same temperature as the tank. Once that happens, there is no more cooling effect.
just a thought... may or may not work but give it a shot if you have a spare beer fridge lying around.
personally , iwould just spend an extra few hundred bucks and buy a chiller.