Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Here's the situation -

I just moved to Redding, CA.
This involved purchase of a manufactured home.
It does not have air conditioning - I will add that next year, buying a place hurts finances - and the cheap kind of A.C. that hang from windows aren't allowed in this community. I have to get a central unit when I get A.C. I do have a swamp cooler - but those aren't very effective on really hot days.

I currently have a amphibian tank with one Japanese Fire-bellied newt (I think it's a japanese - it's definitely a fire belly, but I'm not positive on the exact species) and one Rice Paddy Frog (Occidozyga lima)

The fire belly newts generally don't like their water in the high 70's or higher. They are more likely to get stressed and thus diseased.

Here is what I'm doing to keep things cool - I'd like other ideas from others in hot climates.

My amphibian tank has a waterfall - an undergravel filter with a pump attached sucks water and pumps it to the top of a plastic stair case waterfall.

There is a plastic support for the waterfall that goes the width of the tank - and has about 3/4 of inch between it and the back.

I have river rocks between this support and the back of the tank to ABOVE the water level. When it starts to get warm, I put ice cubes made from bottled spring water into this area - note that they do not float in the water.

As the ice cubes melt, they remove warmth from the rocks they sit on (energy of change of phase) and slowly drip cold water onto these rocks. The cold water influx is thus slow, and not sudden - and since cold water goes towards the bottom of the tank, it is pumped and mixed with the tank water down the waterfall.

So far this has been very effective at keeping a uniform water temperature in the low 70's - when the air temperature of the room is in the 90's (and the water temperature hits the mid 80's without this).

The japanese newt, when it is hot, tends to hang around the back of the tank - probably because the back is cooler than the rest (as the ice cools the rocks on the other side of the support)

I do want to note that I do not think that having ice floating in an amphibian tank is a good idea - and that the ice is not where the amphibians can come into contact with it, and is made from bottled spring water. Also - you don't want to use ice that has been in your freezer for more than a few days as refridgerator air circulates and ice tends to absord stuff from the air.

A person I know used a similar method to cool their newt tank. They had a submersible pump in the tank that pumped warm tank water through a piece of flexible clear tubing. The Tubing ran into out of the tank in into a near by insulated chamber with a metal can in it. The tubing was tightly wound around the can, then ran out of the chamber and back into the newt tank. Ice was placed in the metal can to cool the water in the tubing.

I have two fire salamanders and some FBT's and what I do is just take some ice cubes and leave them on top of the screen cover, they melt slowly and promote a gradual cooling. Occassionally I stick some on the floor of the tank and I've seen my fire salamanders using them for pillows. No AC in your community? that sucks, you can get internal AC's for about 700 bucks but they have to vent to the outside. It's cheeper than central but you only get one room's worth of coverage. Personally I'd just stick one in the window anyway and dump my garbage on anyone who complained.