Waste of money. The "chilling" is very minimal, and you still have to deal with the exchanged heat, which will remain in the room, and work to warm your water back up. Even when you use an actual chiller, you have to keep the heat from the chiller from adding the exchanged heat back into the room. You either need to keep the chiller in an adjacent room, or in an isolation box that exhausts the heat externally.
Yep, it's called "evaporative cooling". It will raise the humidity levels in the room, but it's a small trade-off that can easily be remedied.
How do you do this and keep light out of the res?
Scroll down towards the bottom of my thread, and you'll see how I've got mine set up. There are two setups, so make sure to scroll all the way to the bottom. A fan blowing across the surface of the water will take a few degrees off. Blowing cool air across the surface will drop it quite a bit. I have my res in a dark corner, but as long as there aren't any powerful lights hitting the water, it should be fine without a lid. I have a square cut out of my lid where I insert the flexible duct, which I think helps even more. If your room temps are high, you can wrap a blanket, or insulation, around the reservoir.
LED lights, open Atami lid, 12V car fan and small 12V power source.
