Does anyone keep nanoreefs without chillers?

[miwashi]

Am interested to do a 1 gallon tank of mushrooms and polyps, maybe leather coral fragments, but has anyone had longterm success without chillers?

[MiminoloGy]

If the room temperature can keep the tank well below 29-30 degrees it shan't be a problem with mushrooms, leather maybe not so.. Not sure what you mean by polyps though because it means individual animal in corals

[teebs]

Am interested to do a 1 gallon tank of mushrooms and polyps, maybe leather coral fragments, but has anyone had longterm success without chillers?

Yes it definately can be done but you need to use a fan to cool down the temperature of your tank water to around 27-28 degC.

However, using fans means that you will need to top up quite a bit of distilled water daily.

[EvolutionZ]

1 gallon? how small would that be?

[MiminoloGy]

Slightly more than 3L?

[EvolutionZ]

what i mean is the size of the tank.. should be really small.

[Jimmy]

1 gallon is like 20x10x10cm tank size! so small!

[cdckjn]

you can keep a nano or pico without chiller but it does limit your choice of livestock. If you want corals then water quality is very important and temperature is important too.

if you just keep fishes, then it is not so important although inany sense for a nano or pico, water parameters are critical to survival of the livestock.

[Fuzzy]

you can keep the temperatures within the 27 - 29C range with a fan (evaporative cooling) but the tiny volume of water will mean massively fluctuating salinity levels.

It might work with incredibly hardy soft corals, but might not be viable in the long run. The minimum recommended size for a nano tank, especially for a first timer is 10 gallons.

Also ensuring adequate lighting is very important, and not so easy to achieve in a pico tank.