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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."
Well I guess a site called Digital Explosion is really the best suited to report this.
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:
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.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
9 minutes later, and it's Slashdotted already.
I guess those water cooled things *still* don't hold up.
Some web server somewhere has probably just evaporated in a cloud of steam.
WARNING : All power supplies have capacitors in them. These components can hold an electrical charge for days even weeks. We do not recommend that anyone opens up their Power Supply unless they do know what they are doing and are willing to take responsibility for their actions.
:D While that little sticker's intact, you can go and whine at your supplier if/when it goes bang. In any case, I'm not afraid so lets get stuck in :
:) Look carefully at the bottom of the board and then double-check the top surface. You should be able to work out which joints on the base correspond to the components on the other side. All the components have three legs which makes life a little easier. I've found quite often that the heatsinks have an additional soldered connection or two to help keep them attatched to the board. Here's a couple of pics of the components and the base of the board :
:D
:/ Having soldered the above into the PSU, I quickly re-assembled the thing and here's the results (photos taken just before I replaced the outer casing) :
:D Wow, this things so goddamn quiet - I love it! There's now only the two panaflows at the front running and they're at 5v each so you can barely hear them. With the disks encased in foam, even when there's hard disk activity, my machine's still damn quiet!
DISCLAIMER : The author of this article and the owner of this page are not responsible or liable for any damage caused to any equipment or persons. In attempting what is detailed below you are taking full responsility for your actions.
A Brief Introduction
When I went about water-cooling my first PSU, I was learning as I went along so now I've had the experience, I'm in a better position to do a decent job. In this article I'll go through, step-by-step, showing you how to water-cool your PSU from scratch! I started off with a nice little QTec 550W PSU :
If you've read the first article I wrote on water-cooling your PSU (which was aimed more at inspiring people than being a step-by-step guide), you'll know that my basic plan is quite simple. Basically, it involves replacing the fans / heatsinks with plates of copper. Each plate has a copper pipe soldered to it which is where the water runs to remove the heat. We'll get to that later - for now lets look at taking this thing apart.
Disassembly
If you have any doubts, this is the time to think again. As with just about every mod on this site, the first thing to do is void your warranty
Four tiny screws later and the top should be loose. If you're doing this to a different PSU, you may find there's a fifth screw near the base - there was one on my old AOpen PSU. Here it is, guts exposed :
Now the whole point of water-cooling the thing was to make it quieter so lets go ahead and get rid of those pesky fans :
I found that Q-Tec had been very helpful and given each fan a little connector that can easily be removed. Here's what you should have after removing the noisy beasts :
Noisy though the fans are, your PSU isn't going to work for very long without some kind of cooling. At this point you should be able to see the two heatsinks we're going to replace. Attatched to the sinks, you'll see rows of components - these are the really hot bits in your PSU and it's these that we'll be cooling. Now if we're going to replace the heatsinks with our water-cooled plates we need access to said components. There's two steps to this. First we need to remove the four screws that hold the main board of the PSU :
Next we need to remove the little board that attatches to the connector where you plug your PSU into the wall. If you don't do this, you'll have to bend the back of the PSU to get the board out!
Okay, all being well, you should have a fully disassembled unit :
The next step is a little more tricky. We need to get those heatsinks off those components but unfortunately, you won't be able to get to the screws that hold them on. So what do we do? Un-solder them of course
Right, lets get the first heatsink off :
With a little more de-soldering, here's the second one removed as well :
Removing the components and attatching them to the new water-cooled plates is a doddle. Just remember two points when doing this :
1) Whatever you do, DON'T FORGET what order the components went in - it could be disastrous if you got them mixed up!
2) Be careful when re-attatching, not to leave out the Mica shims (the grey pads). These stop you getting mains voltages going through the heatsink or water-block so they're pretty goddamn important!
Here you can see them attatched to the water-block I made :
If you're wondering how to get the holes on your block in just the right place, do what I did and use the heatsink you took off earlier as a template
Re-assembling the beast
The next step is to re-attatch the components to the board :
Now I run an XP in my machine and I have no intention of moving to Intel so the P4 connector's just taking up space in my machine. The same is true of the old ATX connector so I got rid of 'em :
Next it's time to implement a very handy bit of kit which makes water-cooling a little safer and easier. When you turn on your machine you don't want to have to remember to turn your pump on - if you forget, your liable to burn your chip! So what can you do to get around this? The answers simple - a 12v relay. Basically, when the computer starts, the 12v line coming out of the PC goes from 0 to 12v which closes the relay, starting the pump. I also find it useful to have an overide switch so you can pulse the pump on and off (to get rid of any trapped air in the system). Here's a quick diagram of the way my circuit works :
Apologies for my poor photochop skillz
And finally, here you can see it installed as I wait for the system to bleed :
Time for some tea and biccies! Well, I tentatively flicked the switch and as I cringed, waiting for a loud bang followed by fireworks, my machine quietly booted
The first thing that came into mind when i saw "Water Cooled Power Supply", was "Darwin Award"...
It'll probably end up there somewhere in the coming months, now that this has been on slashdot.
Well I guess a site called Digital Explosion is really the best suited to report this.
Yeah, I have a couple of problems with the way this was carried out. Conceptually, I would love a completely water-cooled computer since I'm tired of the noise. But this is pretty dangerous.
Why remove the existing heat sinks? Rather than removing them from components and risking forgetting a mica insulator or doing other damage, why not simply take advantage of them as an easy surface to which to attach cooling tubes. Most power supplies I've opened, I could solder copper tubing to the heatsinks fairly easily.
The other thing is that the mass of the heatsinks would provide a little thermal inertia to buy you some time in the event of a bubble or other failure.
I've also got concerns about the overall safety of this. Even without mica insulators or any other outward signs, a heatsink may be running at some potential other than ground. Pure water isn't very conductive, but all the same, your cooling water is likely to be grounded - and should be grounded. Pumping water through a tube attached to a component or heatsink will bring the water to that potential; using a piece of plastic tubing to insulate one metal tube from another is NOT safe.
What you need to do is have electrically insulating but thermally conductive means to couple the heat to the tubing. Mica insulators and thermal transfer grease are a good start.
I think I'd solder some copper tubing to some copper sheetmetal, and then I'd coat the flat surface with heat transfer grease, add a sheet of mica and more transfer grease, and then screw it to a heatsink inside the power supply. I'd use off-the-shelf electronics hardware to screw the two pieces together but maintain their electrical isolation: even Radio Shack sells the stuff.
Make sure that the water is grounded, and then run the power supply from a Ground-Fault Interruptor (GFI) receptacle like you'd find in a bathroom. This way, a water leak in the power supply should turn off the power at the outlet and reduce the risk of a bigger problem.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
...is because all of the discrete components need cooling, not just the ones that have heat sinks. It might be as much as a year before he smells the delicate aroma of cooked dielectric when a capacitor overheats and explodes.
Karma
Ok, I can't read the site because it is slashdotted, and yeah, you shouldn't trust these guys anyway, because of what they are doing.
But nonetheless, your logic is shit. I know HV electricians, pipe workers, welders, heavy plant operators, who don't even know what the internet is, but spend their lives doing stuff more dangerous that you can comprehend.
It constantly annoys me that geeks think that they know better than everyone else, just because they know the exact ins and outs of computers and networking. Yes, they are important... but there are far more important things in life.
I'm the (crazy?) guy that wrote that article and I feel it's only fitting I answer some of your reservations :)
First of all, the article included a disclaimer indicating the dangers of capacitors inside PSUs and hence the need for caution. That said, I've never opened a PSU and magaed to find any voltage left in them (carefully tested with a multimeter).
The reason I used water is that it is the best combination of price vs performance. Admittedly if there was a leak, my machine would be in serious trouble. The way I've constructed the thing, it's no more likely than the fan dying to be honest!
The PSU does actually still get a little air flow since my case has two 120mm fans at the front running at 5v. They're blowing across the radiator which cools all the stuff that's water-cooled.
With regards to the worries about "live heatsinks" I've tested every PSU I've water-cooled and in each and every one, there hasn't been a single "live" heatsink.
Hope that clear things up a bit for the more sceptical of you ;)