Water Cooled Power Supply

lmd writes "Digital-Explosion has an article with step-by-step instructions on how to cool a power supply with water (yes, water) instead of fans/heatsinks to make it quieter. Please read the warning and disclaimer (and buy insurance if you don't have any) if you decide to try this at home."

Comments

Toilet-Water CPU (and PSU) Cooler

[BigBlockMopar]

Here's a thought I had, but probably will never get around to building.

Lots of people go to the expense and effort of building/buying radiators or using large tanks of water as the heatsink for their water-based CPU cooler systems.

Last year, I started measuring the temperature of the water in my toilet tank. After a flush, it drops to 5-6 degrees Celsius. Between flushes, it gradually reaches room temperature, of course, but this is still no worse than a radiator or bucket. In practice, however, it never actually gets above about 10C (while room temperature is about 20C).

In other words, it's a supply of cold water which you were going to simply flush away.

Place a small bucket inside the toilet tank. Put a submersible pump in there, run the water to the CPU coolers, bring the water back and drain it over the bucket in the tank.

Everytime you flush the 6 beers you went through while flaming me for my Linux isn't ready for the desktop article, you can rest assured that the water which cools your CPU is being replaced with fresh, cold water. No mold, no mildew.

The purpose of putting the pump in the bucket is so that there's always a supply of water for the pump, even during the flush. And the purpose of draining the return line over the bucket is so that if your toilet tank doesn't refill for some reason, you'll still keep your bucket full of water and buy some time for hardware monitors to shut the system down if it's getting too warm.

I don't know how hot the water in the toilet will get, but think about this:

• The bucket full of water in the toilet tank is replaced during each flush but isn't actually available for a flush. You'll save water.
• You'll be removing the CPU-heated water from the house and will therefore reduce the load on your air conditioning system.
• You get to piss on the scourge of the overclocker, that excess CPU heat.
• Warming liquids enhances their ability to dissolve things, including ...dark matter. You might have to clean the toilet less often.

Of course, the only thing I'd worry about is the quality of the submersible pump. After all, if water leaked into the pump, then the water in the toilet could come into contact with one side of the AC line... the other side of which is grounded to your fusebox. If you happened to touch another grounded object while urinating (concrete floor, sink faucet, etc), then enough current could find that your stream of urine and urethral tissues are a more attractive ground path than the plastic sewer pipe. I think I'd invest in an isolation transformer (search ebay) to reduce the risk of highly ...unpleasant... damage.

I think if one were pumping water through tubes soldered to the heatsinks of their power supply, the risks would be compounded, conceivably by a failure on the primary side of the power supply: I think I'd make a point of running the computer on an isolation transformer as well.

Ahh... the joys of being an eccentric genius.