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Oil-Cooling 802.11 Infrastructure
gomoX writes "A group of 802.11b fans in Tordera, Spain, are running a wireless node on the roof of a building, with the idea of a free wireless network for everyone on the neighbourhood. Its a system running linux with a home made can antenna, mounted on a plastic tool box in the roof. To keep it cool under the sun and protect it from rain, wind, they have immersed it into vegetable oil (yes, the whole thing). As oil is non-conductive, everything should run fine. The site is in Spanish, here is the google translation and the google cache."
In Australia our major power supplier here does that for all of their high-tension cables that go underground - they're encased in a layer of plastic, but the rest is oil. It not only is cheaper and lighter than other sheathing forms, but it insulates and dissapates heat at the same time
The reason why they used oil is first to avoid the whole thing to get drowned. They reckon that it will avoid condensation water to fry the motherboard... How paradoxal.
It also rubs the lotion on its' skin, or it gets the hose again...please do not be pressing in the penguin, as that excites the penguin too much.
Thank you for your support.
Wow... this is a phenominally bad idea for several reasons... I think they were just doing this for the coolness factor (ha ha ha).
First off, we're using wires to transmit our signals in the first place,so instead of immersing the whole fixture in oil, you ought to run wires up to the rooftops and have all of the computer equipment in the house, in a nice air conditioned room. That will solve the problem of the HDD and motherboard overheating. Just buy some nice fans, electric cooling units, or if you really are worried, water cool the sucker.
Second, yes oil makes a great cooling system, but NOT vegetable oil. They ought to have bought a non-biological version so that it won't spoil and grow things. Anaerobic microbes building up on a motherboard is not a good thing. Not to mention the oil will loose consistancy then, and develop pockets of non-oil byproducts of anaerobic respiration. Mineral oil would work much better, and is nearly as cheap. A gallon of the stuff ought only run $10 or so, compared to $5 for vegetable oil. 2x the price, but it would never have to be changed.
Thirdly, I wonder why they feel the need to use oil for cooling at all, if the attenna is the only thing exposed (as I suggested earlier), heat from the sun won't really effect performance to much, and if it does, build a shade. If it is water proofing you are worried about, that is a slightly different story, but you can easily encase it in transparent plastic (but be careful that it doesn't warp em radition passing through it, this has to be quality stuff.
The idea in general is cool, but not very practical.
They are using the wrong type of oil for their project! For starts the oil is organic and will spoil, making things messy. Veggie oil is, in the family of fluidic heat conductors, a poor performer.
What they can use and is readily available at any store that sells Amateur radio gear or wholesale electrical supplies is transformer oil..
It's actually designed to be used in what the RF techs call dummy loads to conduct the heat away from the resistor banks that absorb the RF energy when they test transmitters. The stuff's most commonly used to wick away heat from electrial transformers, both at substations and the transformers hanging on the poles that supply 240 Volt AC to your home.
One COULD try to build a oil-cooling system on a custom PC, but the heat removal would not be as good as glycol/alchohol/water cooled system.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
God, that sounds like some bad tech support joke -
(in Spanish):
"Your hard drive failed, sir?"
"Yes, yes, it was running fine just a few days ago, but now it won't read or write at all."
"Hmm. Odd. Is the drive plugged in and installed properly?"
"Yes, I immerssed it in a vat of vegetable oil."
"..."(sound of head banging against wall)
I wonder if that broke the warranty...