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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."
Once I had the idea to cool my computer with water from my tropical aquarium. Or, to put it the other way, heat my tropical aquarium with the heat generated by the computer. I didn't implement the project because the aquarium was nowhere near the computer, moving them closer together wasn't feasible, and I didn't feel like putting a hose through the living room just for this project. So this project is filed with the dozen of other cool projects to do later in life.
Turn it off. Right now.
Chlorine. Bird droppings. Leaves in the pool. Human sweat, with its high salt content. Algae heaven. That setup is going to provide very effective cooling for a couple of months before something corrodes through - and when it does, you will have a leak. Possibly a big leak - and a leak that will not stop flowing until the pool is empty, potentially enough water to flood your house.
If it works fine with a bucket, why do you have to use an entire swimming pool?
By the look of the setup in the article, multiple CPUs are tapped into the line from the pool, potentially dozens all in the same room, all watercooled from the same water source. The bucket did well for just one, but not multiples.
I'd be inclined to talk to a chemist and/or a metallurgist about compatibility between the pool chemicals (chlorine, various hypochlorites, carbonates, bisulfates, etc.) and your waterblocks.
rj
The pump is a Grundfos hot water recirculating pump. This type of pump is ideal because it is designed for continuous operation and has very small power requirements (~85 watts). This pump is not approved for outdoor use, so a waterproof box had to be constructed from sheet ABS plastic.
And here we have the first potential failure in the chain.
Putting it in 'a waterproof box' is not the same as using a pump designed for outdoor use. Condensation inside the box WILL kill it.
When I was in the Navy, most of our critical systems, especially combat system computers, consoles, and the like, were water cooled. What the heck, we were generally surrounded by the stuff. Then again on a warship we had the plumbing, back-up systems, and the personnel to handle everything from routine maintenance to casualty repair. I'd hate to see the effects of an earthquake, pipe freeze/burst, or an electrical outage. Did this guy say he lives in California?
Actually TFA's idea has merit, but if I was going to go through all that expense and work, I would have taken it one step farther and researched / built a heat exchanger like they use in nuclear reactors - the clorinated pool water stayes in a closed loop that runs through the heat exchanger and then back out to the pool, and in the other loop is a freshwater (or radiator fluid with anti-corrosive properties, or whatever best suits for liquid cooling computers) that cycles through the heat exchanger and then back to the computers.
The only additional expense / work would have been an additional pump for the closed loop on the computer side, and figuring out the heat exchanger. A small car radiator (for the pool loop) in a 55 gallon plastic trash can with in/out tubes for the computer loop (this makes it easy to add coolant to the computer loop) would have been a very good start. If the system ever needs a little help, just throw a ziploc bag full of ice-cubes into the trash can (a good way to keep the system up if the pool loop ever goes down, too.)
Then again everybody can be an armchair quarterback, I give the guy props for actually getting something done.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
If you go that far you might as well consider cooling the external coil of a decent size AC with pool water. In fact the mod is quite easy. You rip out the housing, chuck the fan out, pack the coil in a tank and hook up a pump to the relay used to drive the fan.
One of my dad friends in Russia had done that in his summer house for household hot water. He used the fridge external coil to preheat the water before the boiler unit. Worked quite well actually.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Why bother with it at all?
Between keeping the existing AC running during summer + buying some quiet fans to replace the noisy ones and:
-possibly running pool water inside, and the risk of having pool water leaks inside as chlorine corrodes stuff (NOT pretty!) and likely some condensation (risk of shorts and electrocution even - think about using GFIs)
-having to run pipes for heat exchange through holes in the wall of the house (no thanks!)
-having water tubing all over the place going to every computer (like the wires alone isn't bad enough, and it's not a good combo)
-risking the pipes blocking from something (like leaves or even a pinched hose) or running out of water (leak, pool level too low or something)
-risking the whole thing freezing over (guaranteed in some regions - unusable here in Canada)
-having to run multiple lines (one per PC?) if the water gets too hot after each computer (after a few it wouldn't really be cooling anymore)
-having to buy several hundreds of $ hardware (heat blocks, pumps, flow switches, lots of piping, insulation, heat exchanger, coolant, filtering system, etc) for a sub-par system/solution that will surely be problematic (it's just a matter of time)
I'd just forget about the whole thing, and buy some quiet fans (dirt cheap too). Anything more than that, and you setup a server away in the basement or something, and run some diskless PCs (booting off iSCSI or something) when possible and also use that server to hold everything that needs lots of disk space (media files, etc) to keep the amount of HDs spinning nearby as low as possible.
My old university once cooled the main server room with water from the fountain outside the building....
Worked fine until a particular group of students decided that it would be great fun to make a big bubble bath out of the fountian... several gallons of 'joy' soap later, and the server room was overheating a bit, and the pumps were burning out.
Oh well...
Some people are only alive because it's illegal to kill them.
As an aside, if you ever want to see three people really jump in a crammed laser booth, it will happen when a water leak springs up at a soldered joint just inside that power supply and just above the lunch box sized transformer in the bottom of the unit, also real close to where the three phase power ties in. That resulting bang will really get your heart pumping !