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Using a House's Concrete Foundation To Cool a PC
Agg writes "Well the slab gets poured on Wednesday so I thought I would sink 6 meters of copper pipe in the slab so that I can run my water loop through it when the house is finished. I hope to have water year round at about 16deg [about 61F]. No need for radiators or fans with chilled water coming straight out of the slab!"
How are you going to explain that if you want to sell that house???
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I presume you mean 16 degrees centigrade, as opposed to degree Fahrenheit, or Kelvins or Rankines.
Brett
that is what I want to know.
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... literally. But why limit yourself to PC cooling? Turn the slab into a big radiator and pump air from the upstairs/attic through - you can moderate the temperature of your whole house.
If you were pouring the concrete, why didn't you put it outside of the concrete? You would probably incur less structural risk ... although I doubt a pipe that small would have much effect. More and more people are building new houses with geothermal exchange to help mitigate costs in heating and cooling.
My work here is dung.
Depends on who you've contracted the work out to. I'm not kidding. Some inspectors "know" the contractors such that they only do a cursory inspection of the finished product before signing it off.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
And you haven't thought through the consequences yet? That my friend is a project that has failure written all over it.
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Copper makes the most sense in this application.
Copper makes the most sense for conducting heat. BUUUT this is a moronic idea. If anything goes wrong there is no way to fix it short of breaking through the concrete to get to the pipe. The house could settle or shift and crush or break the pipe (or there could be an earthquake).
First house ever built on land that needed a sacrificial piece of metal.
You're limited by the efficiency of the heat moving through the copper strap. You'd probably want a heat pipe. Even then, keep in mind that most heatsinks actually have quite a large surface area, so moving it to your case doesn't buy you much. (Assuming you're using the case-as-a-heatsink for thermal exchange. The case isn't really worthwhile as a thermal reservoir.) Heat pipes are great for moving heat to an easier-to-cool location, though -- which is what is often done with laptops.
Yeah, that 6m of copper tubing will probably make the house explode, right?
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Copper is also wicked expensive if you priced it out. You are FAR better off running 2 to 3 times more super cheap PEX than copper. Copper also can't flex very much before cracking which is a big deal when you are running it to something that WILL get moved. It also subject to dielectric corrosion.
Just a few hundred feet of plastic tubing heats my entire house even when it is -25F outside. PEX tubing is used almost exclusively in modern heating and cooling coil systems (underfloor and underground.)
Copper makes sense when the application doesn't allow for long lengths of tubing when you need maximum dissipation in the minimum space. That is NOT the case here which, with the other disadvantages of copper, make it the WRONG choice in this application.
Jeez, this all seems quite a complex way to cool a computer. If only there was some way this could be neatly packaged inside the computer itself.
The contact of your rebar to the copper will setup an galvanic corrosion problems.
He's already said in the forum "Im going to separate the copper so that it is not touching the steel reinforcing bar." Of course, that won't protect him from the concrete (as others have pointed out) but the rebar won't be an issue.
Aside from not worrying about the slab breaking and damaging the pipe (the rebar he shows in the picture will prevent that) I don't understand why people are so afraid of concrete? Ever put a toilet or shower in a basement? You take a saw, cut a hole for the fixture, cut a trench to the drain pipe, fit the new pipes, pour replacement concrete into the hole and trench, and trowel it flat. It adds a few hours or so to the job, a few bucks for renting a wet saw, some sacks of concrete, and a messy wheelbarrow to clean up. It's hardly unfixable. And it's certainly not rocket science.
There are no dangerous cables embedded in a slab that would lash out and kill you if you cut them. It's not like homeowners use post-tensioned concrete for ground-level floors! About the worst damage you would do in an average home would be to nick an existing buried pipe, and you'd see that problem instantly as you clear the rubble from the trench. (You'd probably smell it even before you saw it.)
John