Crazy brain storm

[kipreefer]

Well speaking of chillers after reading 2MH=HOT. Is the ground temerature pretty much all the same through out the world. Except for cold palces i know (permafrost). How affective do you think it would be to run a large amount of piping under the ground out side of your house with pump on it. DO you think this would act as a cheap way to chill. Kind of like a septic field in a way. You can have it on in the summer and have the pump the pump on thermostate of some sort and then you can use earths lower temps to chill your aquarium. Crazy i know mainly theorietical but hey i figured id through it out to you guys.

 

[Nameless]

Assuming you keep your house at 72* FH, you wouldn't necessarily need to run it through the ground, where it WILL FREEZE (where you are anyway). You could just run it through some pipe in your house. the air would cool it off. esp if the pipe ran through a fresh water pool of some kind.

That way you don't need to deal with leaks.

 

[kipreefer]

Well i was figuring if you insulate the pipes going into the ground till about 3 feet under i figured water wouldnt get cold fast enough to freeze. Unless you turn it off then it will freeze till spring.

 

[SteveP]

Interesting idea. You'd have to run the pipe below the frost line which is 36" deep for most places. That's a lot of digging plus you need to make a hole in your wall (or go through a window?)

Steve
8{I

 

[Katspaw]

Now this maybe interesting to you. I am a home show addict. I love watching these restoring old homes and such. Well anyway, they had a air conditioning and heating compnay that was doing the same thing you are talking about to heat and air condition homes. the trench you will have to dig in your area well have to be deep. I am not really sure, and you will have to have the piping coiled in many circles before coming back to your home. You would want to use a flexible pipe that they use for under ground sprinklers. and the size of the pump to run this system will have to be huge. Ampmaster 3000 would be to small and it costs almost 400. dollars. so in reality it would work but make cost you more to do this than it would to just buy a chiller. Now if you have a rather large tank that requires a chiller over 1/2 hp then this is something that maybe cost effective for controlling the tempature with your tank, of course you will need to remove a lot of ground as well. I am sure if you do a search you would be able to find more spec's on this. Just letting you know it can be done.
Tracey

 

[kipreefer]

So it is possible. I was just thinking hey this may actually work and i guess it can. I only have 90 gallon and i live in michigan and i have PC's so i really dont have a heat problem in the summer. I just thought maybe it would intrest other people. Would it need such a large pump becasue of the amount of surface area of piping the water has to run over? Because if it is a coming back up to the same aquarium level would you really need that big of a pump. I would expect that the type of piping you use would make diffrence also because alot of plastics are good insulators. Now glass would be probable the best no corrosion bad insulator but fragile as no other. Any one else have a input on this. I like talking about new things that dont already exist its kind of fun.