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Originally Posted by BDForgan
The little $200/$400 heat sink chillers you see advertised in the fish tank industy stink. They'd have a hard time keeping the little Siamese Fighting Fish glass bowls sold at Wal•mart at 70° much less 5 gal. The heat sinks would have to be 10 times the size to work, which is no different than what I've seen some of you doing with the radiator PVC pipe setups
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Actually, I've had great luck with the PVC pipe chiller method...
I used about 30' of 3/4" PVC pipe and a bunch of elbows to make a chiller coil that's submerged in a 55 gallon plastic barrel of water. Acid gets pumped through it from my 20 gallon tank. I keep a trickle of cool spring water running through the barrel to keep it cool, and the spent cooling water goes down the hill to water my pear trees.
With an inside shop temperature of 90F, and a starting acid temp of 80F, I can turn the chiller on and get the tank temp down to the mid 60's in less than 1/2 hour (with no anode current). With 10 amps or so of anodizing current, I can maintain 70F indefinately as long as the shop doesn't get much over 90F. It's not as sexy as a fancy titanium chiller, but it seems quite adequate for my purpose and the price was certainly right...
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