Water Cooling Computers With A Swimming Pool

guzugi writes "This is a project I have been working for several months and been hypothesizing for much longer. The basic idea is to shortcut the need for an air conditioner when cooling multiple computers. Swimming pool water is pumped into the house and through several waterblocks to effectively cool these hot machines. This greatly reduces noise cooling requirements."

Comments

Pool water?

[Eevee]

Because I always choose clorinated water to ensure the maximum corrosion in my computer's cooling system.

Some practical advice...

[(H)elix1]

Watch out for condensation if your coolant (swimming pool water) is colder than room temperature! You don't need crazy temp differentials to cool a CPU. If you pull water from outside, odds are it will be colder than the air around your water block. This can cause all sorts of problems. Room temperature water is even easier to deal with than cold water. If you are just looking for quiet operation rather than crazy overclocks, you won't need the pool.

Plan for a bit of condensation. Flip your motherboards around so if drops of water (*god forbid*) were to form, they drop away from the mainboard. Water from condensation tends to be pure enough that it won't short out your system as easy as one might think. Still... bad things can happen.

Also, you will want some sort of anti-crap mixed into your water, or you can get all sorts of funky growth. More of an issue for closed systems than water from a swimming pool (with all the CL, etc). Be sure your piping can handle that. I've seen folks use hose that did deteriorate over time. Not pretty. A clogged 'artery' on a heat sink will kill your system dead. Non-conductive anti-crap additive is a really good idea.

Lastly, if the water pump dies, everything else will die. Make sure you have some sort of kill switch so all your hardware shuts down if you lose water flow.

Check out the overclockers forums out there. While you don't need the extreme lower temperatures, a big radiator and large low RPM fan in another room make for a very quite office environment.

He needs a heat exchanger...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

To avoid the problems with chlorinated pool water corroding the waterblocks and other hardware, he really needs to install a water-to-water heat exchanger in the system. Pool water would run in the primary side of the exchanger, with distilled water or glycol on the computer side. A second circulating pump would also be needed.

Urgh! Very bad design!

[gweihir]

Pumping contaminated swimming pool water directly into sensitive cooling equipment is plain incompetent. Sorry about this hard statement.

Problems:

• Corrosion. Unless you want to dump some few thousand liters of anti-corrosion fluid into your pool? And what do you use to clear you pool? Clorine? Ozone? Both a very bad idea in a cooling circuit....
• Clogging: Even with filters, something will be getting through may well cause problems up to completely ineffectiveness
  
• Air buildup. Air will disolve in the water outside and may accumulate in the computers.
  

The right way to do this is with a heat exchanger that is robust on the swimming-pool side and has conditioned water in a closed circuit on the other side. Requires two pumps, but has a change of working longer than a few (if that) months.