drimo

I have been having an issue with heat build up and one easy way to deal with it (without getting a chiller) is to use fans. Fans on an aquarium help to increase evaporation, which cools the aquarium because some of the warm water is replaced with top off water. It does mean the top off water will be used more quickly, so if you go this route, be prepared to refill your top off reservoir more often.

I decided to use some old computer fans as a method for introducing cooler air on top of my tank and underneath my lights. The fans are 80mm case fans taken from some old systems. These fans run on 12v DC and my goal was to be able to plug them into my Aquacontroller 3 to regulate when they are enabled.

The first step was to wire the fans to run on AC. I found an old power converter that has an output of 12v DC and cut the ends off the wire. There were two wires, one solid black and one black-white on the power converter. My fans have two wires, one black and one red. A tutorial I found online at http://www.petfrd.com/forum/articles...rticle&artid=6 said to wire the black to black and the black-white to red wires, but I found that did not work correctly, so I wired the converter's black wire to the red wires and the converter's black-white wire to the black wires. I just used electrical tape to secure the wiring because I don't expect these old fans to last a long time so I can easily replace the fans. A more skilled person might solder the wires together. I also used cable wrap to make the wires easier to manage.



The next step was to attach the fans to my light system. I used zip ties and some cable mounts I found at the hardware store. The cable mounts are adhesive and will probably fall off in time, so I'll need to keep an eye on them.


Finally, I needed to configure my Aquacontroller 3 to turn on the fans when the temperature exceeds 80.5. My reef runs on average at 79 degrees, so I chose 80.5 for now based on the average temperature my reef gets to in the evening when it is the hottest, but I can easily adjust this. This was a fairly easy task of renaming an unused timer and setting the program commands.



And that's it! Pretty easy task!