Chill out!

It won't work well, you will be constantly adding ice and draining the cooler and plastic tubing is an insulator not a heat transfer media. The extra pump you add to circulate it will probably add more heat than you can remove with the ice.
A $10 Wal Mart clip on fan blowing across the longest surface area of the tank will provide many times more cooling power than the ice will guaranteed.

 

Will during the day I have a 24" window fan placed off to the side of the tank blowing on the tank and lights. I put at least 4 to 6 traws of RO water ice cubes in there to make up for evaporation and 4 of these quart size plastic containers of frozen tank water, still not beaten the heat, more so at night while I am sleeping.

 

You could save money by aclimating your wife to a cooler temperature and balance it off with your reef tank. :LolLolLol:LolLolLol:LolLolLol I'm just saying.

 

hahaha! we go to bed at night and its like 84 in our room, im sweating and she tries to snuggle me, GO AWAY! LOL. OK! hot pump! need to find a low volume external pump then.

 

You need to evaluate your pumps and heater, something is creating heat and I suspect a pump. Some such as Mag's and Quiet Ones run hotter than blazes. I had a Quiet One 4000 literaly burn up on me, flames and all. When I switched to the current Ocean Runner 3500 my tank dropped 3-4 degrees in the first 48 hours with absolutely no other changes. I did some testing on pumps back when I was part of Team RC on Reef Central and found several are veru inefficient and create tons of heat. Those two were the worst with Via Aqua and some Rio's up there also. The best at the time were Ocean Runner and Eheim.

 

Boy! you can't win for losing in this hobby, will the heater has been unplugged for almost 2 months now, I will be happy when the weather warrents me to plug that back in. I do have a Rio running my skimmer, 2 large bulky Petco powerhead specials for water movement and a smaller circulation pump, can't remember the brand. hahaha! that's why my wife didn't want me to get involved in the hobby.

 

Try unplugging each pump, one at a time for 24-48 hrs and monitor your temperatures. I'll bet you a dollar to a donut one or more is causing your heat problem.

You could also remove one pump and a time and place it in a 2-3 gallon bucket circulating water and monitor the temperature rise over a couple hours. Same effect and may be quicker.

The clue for me is the temp continues to rise at night when the lights are off when it should be dropping. With an open top tank like yours temperature should not be an issue.

 

Exactly what I am doing right now, I also have some BIG double ziplock bags with water frozen, I pop 1 in in the morning and 1 in in the evening and they do a GREAT job of dropping them temp, my heater even came on over the weekend for a while.

 

Read pickupmans post near the end of this thread.
http://www.reef2reef.com/forums/reef-aquarium-discussion/91305-cheap-chiller-idea-2.html#post1003406
This is further proof frozen water and ice are not efficient methods of cooling a tank. If it starts to thaw frozen food in a 6' chest freezer and only lowers the temp a couple degrees in the display that's not good.

Study the laws of thermodynamics and you will see I am correct.

 

I am with AZDesertRat. A simple $10 6" fan blowing directly on water should really help with your temps. With room temp of 85°, I have no problem maintaining 78° (usually just on the low setting of the fan) in my 55 gal with 30 gal sump. Evaporation can be a great thing