Slashdot Mirror
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."
It would also be a cheaper way to heat your pool in the winter and make your neighbors jealous!
Yeah, someone is gonna have to fill me in. How does one cool noise?
Because I always choose clorinated water to ensure the maximum corrosion in my computer's cooling system.
Dude, do not underestimate the power of a child's full bladder.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
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
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.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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.
From TFA, it would seem that the authour wants to have a cheap way of cooling his system. 85W is a considerable cost. A lot of fans could be run with that amount, and "silent" fans thesedays are getting to be VERY quiet.
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?
Heat Exchanger
Just because you're using the pool as a heat sink doesn't mean you have to run the actual pool water through your computer.
Now, this guy doesn't seem to have caught on to that, but it's not a totally implausible solution. Keeping the heat in water, even through an exchanger, is still more efficient than trying to dump the heat directly to the air, at least until you build a radiator the size of your pool.
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.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
1. Two of the photos shows water piping (including hose connections) right above a set of power outlets. Any leakage here will guarantee a short.
2. I don't see any sensors that will shut off the pump and computers, should the circuit run dry. Water leaks in the house are messy.
Problems:
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Elemental chlorine is an acidic gas. If you use a solid to treat a pool, then the material is a chloride compound, and is basic. Isn't chemistry fun?
Because I always choose clorinated water to ensure the maximum corrosion in my computer's cooling system
Believe it or not, there are pool chemical suites that do not use chlorine. For example, the one I use includes a very strong (90+%) hydrogen peroxide as a sanitizer.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
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.
put your CPU into a separate room.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
On the flipside, to get the Kb of Cl-, you simply take Kw divided by the Ka of HCl. Kw is 1e-14, so a really small number divided by a really big number is an even smaller number - showing that Cl- is effectively neutral.
What I think you guys are confused about is what they put into pools. The chlorine of choice nowadays is calcium hypochlorite - similar to sodium hypochlorite, found in stores as "bleach." (I use quotes because some bleaches aren't chlorine-based.) Hypochloric acid is a weak acid, which makes the hypochlorite ion a strong base. And a strong oxidizer. That's what will get your waterblocks eaten away.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Like this?
You say you're cooling your computer with a swimming pool. I laugh at you. My heat sink is the PACIFIC OCEAN
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!