Question on a River setup for Hillies

[henry]

Planning a hillie river tank setup.
My question concerns tank temp. It does get Hot here in the summer and my tanks do overheat even with lights off tank temps have gone to 85 deg. F. I believe canister filter motor heat accounts for at least a % of the heat.

Question is: Qty 2 power heads may generate too much heat for my tank. Would a good quality external pump be a better option or would it transfer heat as well.

Should I forget about Hillies until I get A/C?

Species I'm currently looking at is sewellia lineolata
http://www.loaches.com/species-index/sewellia-lineolata

Appreciate any thoughts on this, I have not had hillstream loaches before.
Richard

[Blue]

Forget the hillies until you have the aircon. It's not worth trying them especially during hot days. It's actually far too risky to keep them in a temp that high considering how they generally prefer cooler waters. Remember that high temps often reduce the oxygen level which unfortunately they need in order to thrive in your tank.

[LES..]

Hi Richard,

Welcome to the forum :-)
I don't personally keep Sewellia lineolata so I can only comment on how my Pseudogastromyzon cheni survived last summer. We had temperatures over 30C which was of great concern to us but the Cheni seemed quite happy up to 29C. There was a noticeable drop in activity once the temperature went beyond that. I found that a good way to keep the tank temperature down is to have a fan blowing over the surface of the water, this allowed us to keep the tank at around a 28C maximum but did require daily water changes due to evaporation. Another method used was to float bottles of frozen water in the tank. Both methods are, unfortunately, labour intensive.

Question is: Qty 2 power heads may generate too much heat for my tank. Would a good quality external pump be a better option or would it transfer heat as well.

This a common issue with high flow hillstream tanks, The question really comes down to how much complexity you are prepared to live with. The manifold system designed by Martin Thoene is an easy retro fit to any aquarium and can be removed just as easily but adds heat to the system. External pumps remove the heat but require more planning with regards to how water should leave and re-enter the tank, especially so at very high flow rates where large bore pipe work is essential.

Whatever you decide please keep us informed as to how your fish are doing.

LES..

[Vancmann]

Hi Richard, currently it is spring here and the temperature is a cool 50 to 65 deg F. My 100G rivertank has (2) 300GPH powerheads and (1) 950GPH pump. The tank's average tamperature is 82 deg F without any heaters. Like you, i am concerned about the hotter 100 deg months coming up. I am planning to mount the pump externally.

[henry]

Thank you all for your input. I appreciate them all.

I will definately go with an external pump. Now using a external pump I would like to try a pressure side manifold (2 inputs) with 4 corner jets with at least 3/4 or larger pvc. Looking for a current without the blast. Pickup manifold perhaps 4 hydroIII sponge filters. Four uni-directional jets may end up like a toilet bowl. Some trial and error pehaps. (PVC is cheap)

I guess for a pump, ...go bigger than you believe you need and plumb a regulated dump back into the input?

The Pseudogastromyzon cheni were my 2nd choice. May have to look at that one again.

I thank you all for your input and time. You folks are great.
Richard

[LES..]

I'm glad you were able to get some useful information out of that :-)

I will definately go with an external pump. Now using a external pump I would like to try a pressure side manifold (2 inputs) with 4 corner jets with at least 3/4 or larger pvc. Looking for a current without the blast. Pickup manifold perhaps 4 hydroIII sponge filters. Four uni-directional jets may end up like a toilet bowl. Some trial and error pehaps. (PVC is cheap)

Sounds like you will have a lot of flow in this set up. If you are considering a circulating water flow you may want to take a look at Chefkieth's new project which features this approach.
Building a system with localised blasts of water may not be a bad thing as i have just found out myself. After spending a lot of time building a diffuser on the return side of the manifold I realised it was not going to give the effect I wanted resulting in a gentle wash of water at less than 1m per minute, a long way from the 1m per second plus flows these fish will encounter in nature. Dropping the diffuser for some large bore outflows will give my loaches the blasts of water they thrive on. Reaching flows of 1m/s across the whole tank is something i'd love to see but in the case of my tank that would require 780,000lph pumps (I only have 13,000lph combined circulation and filtration.). It would be possible to get faster flows with a lower turnover by opting for a longer, narrower and shallower tank but fitting one of those in my house would be a serious problem.

I'll be very interested to see what you come up with (Yes, that is a serious hint for pictures!). Have fun with it what ever you decide :-)

LES..