As the summer arrives and the weather heats up,
it's important to keep an eye on the temperature of your reef tank.
With some exceptions,
you probably want it to stay around 75 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit or so,
but that's not always easy and you might need to know some tips and tricks for
cooling your tank as we get into the summer,
at least in the Northern hemisphere.
So how can you maintain a reasonable reef tank temperature? Hi guys and girls?
I am ReefMan and this video is all about the ideal reef temperature and some
things that you can do to keep it there. If you're new here then hey, welcome,
I hope you learn at least a little bit or if not,
you can at least enjoy some of the gratuitous coral footage that I like to put
in. So let's get going. Reef tanks,
particularly those with Acropora and corals like that can do well at a variety
of temperatures,
but in general about from the low seventies to maybe around 80 Fahrenheit.
The key is stability.
And if you look at the historical sea surface temperature data,
you probably want to keep your tank in the mid to high seventies all around the
year. For those of you living in cooler climates,
you might just need a heater for the winter to be able to achieve that.
But for those of us in warmer locations like Southern California,
we're going to need to actively cool our tank somehow.
Temperatures over about 80 Fahrenheit - that's about 26 Celsius - are going to
stress your Acropora and other corals over time,
which is going to make them much more likely to get sick,
bleach out and die and keep in mind bleaching is actually the result of a
disease most of the time. Corals,
like most other living things don't just randomly die and if your tank is around
the proper temperature or so the temperature itself isn't going to outright kill
them.
It can be a contributing factor though and that's why it's important to keep an
eye on the temperature of our reef tanks.
So what can we do if we happen to get an email from our apex and we notice our
tank is 85 degrees on some hot summer day,
maybe the air conditioner broke or who knows something like that. Well,
one of the easiest short term options for controlling your tanks temperature is
just to take some normal ice,
close it up in a plastic bag and float that bag in your tank.
This is going to quickly lower the temperature of your tank,
but of course it's not a longterm solution.
It's more of an emergency measure that you can use to prevent critically high
temperatures in the short term,
and this also works a lot better in smaller tanks.
Obviously it's going to take an awful lot of ice to lower the temperature much
at all. In my big reef tank.
If you notice a longterm trend towards higher and higher temperatures like I
have with my tank hitting 80 81 82 degrees Fahrenheit,
you can cheaply fix the issue just by using some fans.
I've jerry rigged a cooling fan using the rails that my lights are mounted on
and this fan on its own is able to drop the temperature of my tank several
degrees as you can see in the temperature charts from my Neptune apex
temperature probe.
Now the downside to using fans of course is that you're going to evaporate a lot
of water and it's also going to work better overall in places with lower
humidity than it will in places with high humidity just because of physics.
With this single fan over my tank and it runs whenever the tank gets over about
78 and a half degrees,
then my tank is evaporating about five gallons of water every day.
That can lead to things like mold and things like that,
so be careful with how much moisture and humidity that you're putting into your
air in your house.
You also need to have an automatic top off system in place to replace the water
that you're evaporating out of it so that you don't impact the salinity of your
reef tank.
Chillers are the 500 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to cooling your
reef tank water.
Using a system very similar to those found in an air conditioner,
these units can drop your tank's temperature by many degrees and then hold it
there with great stability and without evaporating lots of water.
Chillers come in varieties that you have to pump water through and varieties
that have a probe that gets cold that you just drop in your tank.
So there's many ways you can set them up. Chillers can be expensive to buy.
They start around a couple hundred dollars and they can use a lot of electricity
up to many amps when they're running,
so you need to make sure your electrical system is also up for that load.
Chillers also heat up the room that they're running in,
so you should never put one under the stand where all that heat is just going to
rise up and go right back into your tank. Generally,
chillers should be the last resort you turn to for temperature control,
but if you do need one, they're going to work incredibly well.
I will probably end up with a chiller on my tank sooner or later because it's
kind of annoying keeping up with the top off requirements of my fan and having
to make sure that I use five gallon buckets of RODI water for top off.
So that's it for this video. For temperature emergencies,
nothing's going to beat a bag full of ice floating in your tank.
For people on a budget, fans are going to work just great.
Just make sure that you do have a top off system that can handle the
evaporation.
If you want the absolute best and money is less of a concern for you,
a chiller can't be beat. If you do need to keep your tank very cool,
maybe for deep water fish or things like that that need temperatures in the 60s
Fahrenheit, you're almost certainly going to need a chiller.
Tanks like that have a lot of other considerations that you have to take into
account though so I'm not going to go into cold water reef tanks in this video,
but you know, maybe in a future video if there's some interest.
I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope that you learned something new about
reef tank temperature control.
If you've got a good tip for controlling your aquarium's temperature that I
didn't mention then hey, share it in the comments down below,
we can all learn from each other. So thanks for watching.
Stay safe and I will see you next time. Bye.