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

heated pool

[miowpurr]

It would also be a cheaper way to heat your pool in the winter and make your neighbors jealous!

Re:heated pool

[Glonoinha]

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.

Re:heated pool

[arivanov]

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.

Re:heated pool

[ThePowerGorilla]

They actually sell 'Swimming Pool' Heat Exchangers. These are used so you can heat a pool with your boiler, but not let the corrosive pool water destroy your home heating system.

They have the added benefit of making it impossible to drain your whole pool into your house when a line breaks.

Re:heated pool

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

noise cooling requirements?

[Mr Chund Man]

Yeah, someone is gonna have to fill me in. How does one cool noise?

Re:noise cooling requirements?

[Otto-Marrakech]

Two words, Miles Davis.

Pool water?

[Eevee]

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

Re:Pool water?

[Batou]

... not to mention peeing in the pool ...

Re:Pool water?

[mbone]

I had a job cleaning pools when I was a kid. I would worry about algae and other slime. It grows everywhere and needs to be cleaned out regularly.

Re:"Yer In" Trouble!

[terrahertz]

Dude, do not underestimate the power of a child's full bladder.

Tropical aquarium

[Zzeep]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Turn it off.

[Smidge204]

Chlorine is highly corrosive. Ever wonder why everything in a pool system is made of or coated in plastic?

The chlorine attacks iron even in ally form, rotting stainless steel at an alarming rate. It will also react with copper (slowly, but the higher temeratures in the water block are going to help it along) to dissolve the copper into a Copper (II) Chloride solution. That corrodes the copper waterblock and puts the copper into his pool - not good. Aluminum will cause a reaction to make aluminum chloride, and reacting with the water to ultimately form aluminum oxide (which will fall out of solution and likely clog and small passages over time) and hydochloric acid.

You need a heat exchanger to keep the chlorine away from metals. That means a non-metallic heat exchanger or one that's been coated with a chlorine resistent material.

A better solution would be to get an aftermarket automotive radiator and an electric fan, and use clean water (distilled or at least low mineral) with a coolant solution specifically designed to prevent corrosion.
=Smidge=

Re:Turn it off.

[Smidge204]

Because the ladders are generally made of anodized aluminum, which gives it a hard, protective coating of aluminum oxide, and the generally cool temperature of the pool water helps to retard any chemical reaction that might happen.

=Smidge=

Re:Turn it off.

[FireFury03]

The Manchester Computing super-computing centre is located under a little terraced area with a pond in the middle, and someone (jokingly, I hope) told me this was so that a fire would cause a load of water to be emptied on to the source.

Water is commonly used for fire suppression in data centres these days (although it won't come from a pond). When a fire is detected, automatically kill the power and douse the area with a fine mist of deionised water. It's very effective, generally doesn't damage equipment and (unlike halon) is safe for any people who are in the area and is environmentally friendly.

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.

wrong pump

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.

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.

Newsflash: not all pools use chlorine

[sczimme]

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.

One Upmanship

[camperdave]

You say you're cooling your computer with a swimming pool. I laugh at you. My heat sink is the PACIFIC OCEAN