What you crunching with??

[Jason1478963]

I like the thought you guys are putting into cooling.I do like ideas to help reduce furnace run time and a/c run time as money saved could run more crunchers. Do you have any room to add storage for domestic water heating? this works well for me as I let mine get warm enough to take showers and the tankless sits idle most of the summer. the basement still sees more heat then i wold like from the GPUs and power supplies. If a guy could make an evaporative cooler for outside the house would be useful as well. Maybe some controlling done via a temp controller to dump some heat at a given temp. I currently can run 6 computers on one pump/loop. Keep the ideas and projects coming!

[Brucifer]

Jason, how about you detail out your setup/method for your cooling?

[Jason1478963]

Sorry for the slow response as this is a work in progress. I have about 10 computers on liquid cooling. I currently have 4 on one pump and 6 on another pump. These loops are dumping heat in an old water heater i had left over after the tankless water heater upgrade. I built a heat exchanger with copper pipe that uses thermal siphon via the drain port and pressure relief port on the tank. It would be nice to have a solar tank or indirect water tank with a built in heat exchanger if a guy finds a good deal. From the pump I have 4 computers in parallel on one loop. The other started out with 2 parallel loops and 2 computers in series on each parallel. Then after that mess I had to add 2 more in series before it went to the tank. The new choices in pumps may allow a person to do more in parallel then I've tried. To make things easier to change in the future we used case mounted quick disconnects from koolance for each PC. Most of my stuff ended up being koolance as there wasn't as many choices at the time. This also makes it easy to pull a system for upgrades or take it outside to blow all the dust out. Most of my current cooling is cpu water blocks and one machine with 3 water cooled 5850s that is currently down. I haven't decided what to do with the 7xxx cards yet. If I had 7970 cards i would consider a full coverage block. The worst part about full coverage is compatibility and usually can't be used on the next generation or non reference designs. it may be better to move to a block that does the GPU and cool the rest of the card with fans mounted in the door and heatsink the memory and vrms. If you cool the CPU and GPU that pulls a majority of the heat out of the case. I found it better to skip cooling hard drives with liquid as my ambient air was cooler then my loops and less mess. I ended up making my own reservoir out of pvc pipe and t's. I also started making the longer runs to the tank out of 1/2inch PVC pipe with PVC tubing connecting everything.

If i had a large budget i would consider an 80+ gallon storage tank with the heat exchanger built in. I think this would be more efficient at removing heat from the computer loop. I'm going to try a koolance tms-205 as my tms100 seems to have bit the dust recently. This should allow me to dump heat into the hydronic floor in my living room when a certain temp is reached. The TMS100 seemed to do this ok and i'm hoping for more control and longer life with the tms-205. These controllers can also ramp up fan speeds and pump speeds based on temps. This worked well until the controller had a failure and quit powering the pump. I do let my CPUs get a bit on the warm side when producing water for showers. At the computers I would use manifolds with reverse return to attempt to keep the flow rates similar at each PC. Valves could also be used to help balance the flows and temps between the computers. The quick disconnects similar to koolances line would be very useful to add to each computer case on the loop. For the waterblocks a guy would have to shop around and check the reviews as i'm not sure what i'd get today. The last ones I got for the am2+ socket was enzotech that I haven't been able to find anymore. The reservoir I would make myself again with a pressure relief like i have now. If you use an automotive radiator or heater core maybe a guy could get it outside and maybe even make it into an evaporative cooler of some sort. I'm sure a guy could figure out a way to dump into a hot tub or pool as well. I like to do something productive with the heat rather then remove it with a/c. When picking system parts try not to mix copper with aluminum and nickel with silver.

[AMDave]

WOW

[Brucifer]

Jason................................ you brought a tear to my eye!!!!!! That is just positively awesome. Awesome. It would sure be nice to see that work of art! I'm going to have to digest this for a few days while the brain churns and burns as I'm sure there's gonna be some questions, indeed. :-) Cool, an honest to god water cooling junkie!!!!!! I'm proud of you lad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-)

[Jason1478963]

Thanks... I wouldn't call it art as its more of a series of small experiments. This all started out small about 9 years ago and grew slowly. I will look into getting some more pictures of a few things when I get a chance.

IMG_1839.jpg This picture is one of the reservoirs made out of PVC pipe and fittings. A few extra parts for the level indicator but well worth it as it seems evaporation takes place through the large amount of tubing. I located the return at the upper T to help eliminate air from the water coming in. I then try and fill it to around the center of that T or a bit above the T. The top is now used for filling and pressure relief I purchased from koolance. The reservoir is mounted vertical to a leg of a shelving unit the computers are setup on. The supply and return to the storage tank come from above where the return from the tank ties into the upper T of the reservoir.

[Terry1953]

Jason,
Looks like you are doing some interesting things. I have a few friends around here that would love to see some of your work as they have cooling high on their list of interests, they use what they call thump barrels and worms. Most say that the cooling is the key to the quality of their product only second to their mash recipe.

[Brucifer]

Would be very interested in seeing pictures of your setups Jason, along with how-to's and stuff like that. Took a look at the Koolance site, good looking place with lots of good info. Thankyou!

[Jason1478963]

Terry,
I'm not sure on the amount of cooling they need as a 40 gallon tank heats up fast with a few GPU. I think a swimming pool would be an option as it would take a large amount of heat to change the pool temp. pool size, heat exchanger sizing and flow rates will need some math or experimenting. The setups they are using now may also be good ideas for us. It may be possible to add some of these copper coils to rain harvesting systems for a place to dump heat after your water preheat tank has hit your ideal temp. If they are large enough it may not increase evaporation that much or temperature. Would higher rain barrel temps cause other issues like bacteria growth? Would the copper loop in the barrel be an issue?

[Brucifer]

hmmmmmm..... you know the earth is a good heat sink. Too bad it's expensive to dig down. One could trench out a good sized reservoir down several feet and tap into the ground resources to help cool down a large water reservoir. Once it was in though, the expenses would be low. Was just a random brain fart waffling through.................... lol