Aquarium cooling fan: Aquacool

This summer, I installed an aquarium cooling fan for my display tank.  When the metal halide lamp warms up, my tank and the area around it really warms up.  The cooling fan in the metal halide light is noisy and insufficient, so I decided to try the Aquacool fan from ZooMed Laboratories.

Installing a fan to blow over your aquarium water is an inexpensive way to cool the tank and should be explored before purchasing a larger, more expensive aquarium chiller.

The first thing I noticed (and was surprised about) was how quiet this little fan is. While there is a slight hum from the motor, it is all but inaudible over the other sounds of my tank (the drain to the sump pump and metal halide fan being the two loudest sounds that drown everything else out).

The fan has a pretty cool design. It hangs over the side of the aquarium–

so the fan motor does not get wet (or at least as the rest of the stuff on top of my tank seem to get. There is also a suction cup where it adheres to the side of the aquarium. In general, I dislike the suction cups, because they seem to fail over time, but I was mildly impressed by this little suction cup.

I actually had to repeatedly pull it off and reattach when positioning the fan for the first time–it kept getting stuck by accident. It seems to be a fairly robust little sucker.

There is an adjustable head on the air outlet so you can direct the air in almost any direction/angle.  I point it so that there is a nice gentle ripple across the water. I previously used an airstone to disrupt the water surface but no longer use that now that I have the Aquacool fan–and as a result, I have less splashing and salt creep (salt deposits on the hood and side walls, etc.).

If you have hot lights, if your water temperature runs high, or if you want to create a gentle ripple across the surface of the water, this is a neat, low voltage (the box says 12 volts) tool. From the description (12 volts) I thought this was going to be a battery operated fan, but it’s not. It comes with a black power adaptor to plug right into your power strip.