Water Cooling Computers With A Swimming Pool 241
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."
Tropical aquarium (Score:4, Interesting)
Turn it off. (Score:4, Interesting)
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:FROM TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Chemistry? (Score:4, Interesting)
rj
Re:Turn it off. (Score:3, Interesting)
Take what you've done and get a (preferably new) truck radiator and rig THAT up as your means of cooling off the water. Make the water as pure as possible. Life will get better after that. And if you insist on using the pool for this novel purpose, then put your radiator in the pool. The heat from the water in the radiator will be absorbed by the pool water. But even then you can expect the pool water to eat through to radiator material.
wrong pump (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Must have been in the Navy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:heated pool (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Fish Like This Idea As Well (Score:3, Interesting)
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
Re:Pool water? (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried water-cooling some time ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:heated pool (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Turn it off. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
My university tried this once... (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Actually, I had already thought of doing this, but (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:heated pool (Score:4, Interesting)
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 !