Copper-die-contaminated water might not be that good for your plants. Remember the die cooler is made to have a very large contact area with the water streaming through it, so you would get a lot more copper-contamination from the heated copper ribs.
Also, if we actually collected and used the generated heat instead of disspating it, we would theoretically have 100% efficiency. Just like a car in the winter uses a part of the heat generated by the engine to keep the interior warm.
@@der8auer dont know if you knew this, but Lenovo makes a server rack consisting of like 12 blade servers, and its cooled by hooking into city water. Lenovo advertises that you can use the heated water to heat your company building, by radiated heat, instead of using a heat pump or some other dedicated heater. So its 100% efficient. These servers are used often in stock market companies, as the cold water lets the processors hold clockspeeds of 5GHz almost constantly. Being even a few milliseconds faster on the new stock price changes can make a tremendous difference in your company's profit margins. The Lenovo server is called the ThinkSystem SD650 High-Density if you want to look it up.
@@der8auer i have an idea that might be good to be done with pc cooling and i hope that you can try it. i have done it in the past and i think that it will work. if you are interested in my idea let me know so that i explain it to you in a message please
Now pipe this into an insulated reservoir - something like a water heater/geyser. Or into a buffered solar water heating loop after use. Save on your hot water heating costs :D
@@NoorquackerInd Or just hook the output to a tank and then to the intake of the toilets, dishwasher and laundry machines....I don't think the heat is the meaningful part.
@@c.m.7692 you could do both. Heat Exchange the the Heat back out for something useful (Heat, Thermal differential Generator), then use the final waste Water to run some Appliances, yes. bonus points if you can take advantage of Gravity to use a small Turbine. falling one Floor or so without much Head Pressure wouldn't get a lot out of a Turbine, but it would be something.
Oh, and one more thing about this (because I've actually run a setup similar to this before - albeit through a water-water heat-exchanger)... You would definitely want to use some solenoid valves (electronically controlled valves) for both convenience and safety reasons. They come in 12V and are cheap on ebay ect., so using a "default off" solenoid you can make the water flow automatically when the PC has power. If you put the solenoid near the water-source in a more "leak safe" area then you also remove a lot of the potential for any water-damage from a leak while the system is unattended. Lastly - if you wanted to get real fancy with it - using a few chokes and solenoids you could pretty easily set up some switches that could regulate the water-flow to 2-3 different flow-levels depending on your demand. I suppose you could even automate to respond to computer temps, but I never got quite that far :)
Yea if the pc is idle you can go to like 1L/h and you can use the warm water to like wash your hands In theory you can just make a tank for the water and distribute it all over your house and have a system if the tank Will be low it will switch to normal supply of water
Depends on the water, soft water will cause corrosion because it’s more acidic, hard water will lead to limescale buildup, you can put a inline filter in between the tap and pc.
Back in the day before we had refrigeration, during the winter months people would collect as much snow and ice as they could. Then they'd dig a hole maybe a few metres deep (but even 1m is enough for a small amount) and fill it with the ice/snow. Then in the summer months they'd put food below it, surrounded by hay (to prevent ice burn), then cover the top in hay as well. For larger ones they'd dig a tunnel to it so they could actually put the food directly under it. With much less than even a cubic metre of ice/snow, the ice/snow would usually stay there all throughout the summer months and make it all the way to winter. I've thought before about doing the same thing today, except running a loop through the snow/ice instead. And also obviously being able to fill and top it up anytime you like. I haven't done any back of the envelope calculations, and it's obviously not going to last several months like it would normally. But if you had a cubic metre of ice/snow i'm sure it'd still last ages. It could make a very low temperature loop for super cheap and also being environmentally friendly. I don't know how plausible and effecting it'd be. It'd certainly be *cool* though.
The difference is food doesn't generate heat but your pc cooling loop would be actively dumping hundreds of watts of heat into the ice. I'd be surprised if the ice lasts for a day.
It would cost more but there is already a solution that basically uses these principles that have been in use for exchanging heat for nearly 50 years; ground heat exchangers. That system that you described is a fridge based on the fact that the once you get down past the layer of dirt that absorbs the majority of the heat on the surface, the earth is fairly stable temperature-wise all year long. It's generally somewhere between 50F to 60F depending, on location; that's lower than the tap water temp in this video. All you would need to do is run a long length of tubing a few feet under the ground and hook it up to a pump that circulates it. When it comes to the systems that are used for controlling temperatures in homes or greenhouses, you need a couple hundred to a couple thousand feet of tubing snaked back and forth; you could get away with far less if it's just for a PC. In theory, you could even just with air cooling with ductwork instead of tubing for liquid as the air will be fairly cool once runs through the underground system.
@@aprisia That's amazing. I think it would be worth the work to lay the piping all over your yard for this project. Would possibly need city permits for that much digging. On the permit description just say using for a green house garden, ha.
I have done this in the past using my large rainwater tank, I live in Ireland so I rarely ran out ;-) if you live in an apartment its not viable but anybody who lives in a house can have a 200L barrel to catch rain water. you can also run a small pump to go back to the barrel, the pc takes a long time to heat 200L of water (Again I'm in Ireland, I dont know what it would be like in spain and my tank is 1000L) I only stopped because it froze one winter and burst all my pipes, a small bit of effort with insulation could have prevented that.
The water doesn't necessarily need to go down the drain. You could catch the water and use it to fill a tank for irrigating a garden or other uses. A good filter will make sure your waterblock doesn't gunk up.
first thoughts before watching the vid: the waste of water is not that high, imagine the amount you "waste" when flushing the toilet. if i remember correctly ltt did a video about that but as always they didn't go into details. The long term effects might be interesting because, well, it's not purified.
Here in the US we have homeowners using geothermal heating to supplement their heat in the winter because the underground temperatures are near constant. I have always thought a geothermal loop to cool a pc would be interesting too. You would need a pump but the loop would function as a giant radiator. I would think it would perform similarly.
I feel like that you are right, you are wasting pure drinkable water. But look this on the good side. By using the tape water you are sending back clean water into the sewer which does make the waste water every so slightly cleaner when it reach the building that filter the water.
bathtub can serve as a reservoir for testing. use it as a reservoir + a cheap big water pump. you can check how much water is needed to cool a PC if loop size doesn't matter. for constant usage a bath tab can be replaced with a plastic water tank.
This is great in theory unless you're getting your water from flint and the lead in the water reacts with the copper in the water block and suddenly you're mixing metals.
1. Make a closed loop of piping in the earth at 5+ feet 3. Route hoses or pipes out and into your living space with a pump somewhere in there 4. Use what you just built to exchange heat with the ground
i run tap water on my test bench when i need to push it harder as dice and ln2 is way overpriced where i live ($10 per kilo of dice and $9 per liter of ln2). average water temp here is like 5-11c so when i was ocing gtx 580's on direct die liquid metal they wouldnt go above 23c, this was with i think 1.45v core (volt modded) @ 1050mhz. was a huge help and it earnt me 1st place on 1080p extreme super position many times during a battle with a guy from Argentina but he end up winning with asic quality. it is a big waste of water but its far cheaper than dice or ln2 but it also cant achieve those temps.
For testing this method is incredibly useful, and I would add you do not have to waste the water it can easily be piped into five gallon buckets. Then could be used to manually flush toilets, water plants, or cleaning. Since the water would have been used anyway it is effectively free cooling.
Hi, we use a pump to water the garden. Our pipe what goes into the ground is ca.60m deep. The water temp is 14c. Even on the hottest day or at winter too. Our pump uses 750w of energy to lift the water. I mean: if you use the pump to water your garden you can use some of the flow for cooling stuff or even cool a tank of coolant (like a reversed boiler). We typically water our garden like 3-5hours a day, and if you use the full flow to cool a tank of coolant, you can use the stored "heat" to cool your stuff, and the next day, you cool it off again. (our pump is capable of 3000l/hour)
coming from Australia where drought is common (especially in regional areas), you cannot compare energy equivalents. especially when it comes to usable drinking water. but it's a cool concept. also makes me think, what about areas which have hard water (water high in minerals), they would have problems with build up in the loop.
@@MrKonquer these loops are built to run with distilled water, so corrosion from soft water is not a concern. as for hard water, a little bit of vinegar ever few weeks will keep things super clean.
@Michael Roy even pure distilled water with a ph of 7 will eventually turn slightly acidic, water absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere turning it from 7 to about 5.8/9, a sacrificial anode is usually what’s used in soft water treatments which come into contact with metals such as the cooling plate itself. Such as the bottom of ships and inside water heaters. In central heating systems adding inhibitors is also a way to stop corrosion happening.
Mount a radiator outside is what I do, saves on running aircon in the room about 3 months of the year and in winter i can adjust (with Argus) the loop temp with the pump speed to the outside radiator, works well with no issues, the other option i have seen is drop the outside radiator in a rainwater tank
some places has tubing for "gray water", it is basically rain water or unclean to drink, but is used for washing and irrigation. A little bit of filtering and you can just recirculate the hot water back in the system as gray water again! And when gray water became scarce, you can compensate with tap water
Did similar way back in 2007, our water is unmetered and we just pay a yearly amount irrespective of how much we use... Had a rig in fully submerged mineral oil setup, i had a radiator at the rear inside the oil that had a constant stream of cold mains water running through it at about a litre per minute...always kept it very cool, compleatly silent and completely dust free.
A system that sends the water that went through your PC into your water heater, laundry, and toilet tanks would be interesting. Do your tap water energy consumption figures account for chemicals and materials used in processing the water or just water facility energy consumption? Granted, you said your radiator figures don't include copper production and other things. I'm wondering how representative these numbers are of reality. An interesting topic though. I think you're right that it's better to do this than use a chiller for a few days, but long term use by every pc enthusiast is likely worse than a closed loop.
You could just have your radiator in your toilets water tub. Whenever someone uses the toilet the warm water gets replaced with cold water. This also lets you flow destilled water through your radiator and pc components. If you dont use the toilet enough you could auto flush it at a given temperature.
Flushing your toilet uses about 10l of water. To heat these 10l from 18C to a point where it does not keep your pc cold enough under normal gaming loads. (assume 35C) would take 313.2 Wh. Depending on the Power consumption of your pc while gaming this would mean that you would only have to flush the toilet once every hour to keep your pc cooled.
@@Max_xaM Don't even need to flush, have a thermostat bypass the fill valve at a given water temperature and let the overflow drain do its job dumping hot water at the top into the bowl. Better make double-sure the toilet does not clog when people flush though since water will keep coming while nobody is there to stop it.
In the mid 1990's a friend of mine used a radiator and cooling loop with methanol to cool a Cyrix686 which ran HOT and he got a 25-30 degree F temp reduction
I did something similar before and the main difference is the flow rate. I hooked up a well pump in a pull configuration (for obvious reasons) and it dropped temps to ambient and kept them there no matter what I did. The faster you can remove heat, the better performance you get. You just have to deal with the crazy noise of a very high horse power pump or in your situation water waste.
Thanks for this video, was thinking about using house water. There are 2 issues with the approach. 1. If water coming form the city is dirty (if city does any work, and some soil gets into it. 2. Water minerals Another option to not "waste" water is. 1. get a heat exchange tank. (tank with two seperate input/output loops - use copper pipe within a tank). Where water coming into the house and water in the loop are not mixed, but heat is exchanged. Then you get cold temps into the loop and you heat up a large tank of cold water, that can be used in house. And the computer loop will not be affected by quality of water. That is somethign I want to do in the house, and your results affirmed that it is a very good idea. Thanks
Depending on your tap water, wouldn't this cause long term damage to the waterblocks, especially if the tap water is especially hard leaving calcium/lime deposits?
And just buy two of each block , swap over when performance drops , clean the removed blocks ready for next swap . But I think it would take an awfully long time to limescale up . Or have a limescale remover flush through the system , switching this contaminated water to waste . Once flushed through switch back returning back to main tank
It's a common cooling solution in commercial applications. Hotels use it in the air conditioning sometimes because of space constrains or local building "codes" preventing outdoor condensers for the ac. Water cooled ice machines are also very common
Initial thoughts, I'm a generator tech and while not widely used any more there are still units out there that are city-water cooled. They just use a liquid to liquid intercooler, and are usually pretty effective at keeping the engines cool.
I know your recommendation for this setup is directed towards extreme overclockers but I wonder if a setup used like this long-term will have nasty buildup or corrosion of components due to differing standards of tap water by country.
Where I live in the UK we have very hard water, I suspect it would be a yearly job descaling the blocks. Maybe it could be an easy attachable loop filled with vinegar or something. Those quick disconnects would work well for that.
@@user-y6f Food safety standards do not mean there is nothing in the water. Calcium being the big one, Perfectly healthy but defestating for the microfins in a water block.
@@Shinobu420asdf totally true but anyone who cared enough to do something like this would probably use copper components. The only aluminum blocks I'm aware of are from EK's cheaper fluid gaming line
You are spot on with this cooling. The only difference to my system is that I don't want the tap water into my PC parts so I use a stainless steel heat exchanger in-between. I love that you put in all the facts and figures into the video to really show the numbers, however I would have liked to see the difference of water usage of apartments compared with a house.
I work on Emergency Industrial generators. Some use heat exchanges with city tap water run through them. Some smaller ones use marine water cooled exhaust and intake manifolds the only difference clean city water is used over salt or pond water like the boat would use. I have been thinking about using a geothermal loop. You should look into it. Houses use a underground loop for heating and cooling as the earth at a certain depth it always around 50 deg. F. So it works for heating and cooling. If you want your house at 70 on a 20 deg day you only need to heat 20 deg as you have a free 50 deg from the earth . It works the same in cooling. If its 80 outside you have a free 50 degree source to flow though the coil in your air handler. I think burying a loop of coiled pipe or reusing a piece of a forced hot water radiant wall strip buried vertical in your cooling loop would work to cool a pc.
The issue is plumbing for many, I imagine. Unless you store your rig in the bathroom (eek, shower steam) with cables run through the wall to an office, you'd have to run pipes/drains probably, which changes the cost difference.
Here in central AB, Canada, our tap water peaks in temperature during summer at about 12°C, but in during the winter (especially during January and February when temperatures reach sustained -30-40°C) the water is just a couple degrees above 0°C. My family does a lot of home brewing of beer, and we use a Blichmann Therminator counter-flow plate chiller to take the hot wort down from boiling to just blow room temperature. The water goes from just a few degrees to scalding coming out the other end. Home brewers in hotter climates have a lot of problems meeting their cooling needs, but this is not a problem we have up here.
@@sonacphotos Totally normal in Brazil for example, if it's hot outside all day every day you'll eventually warm up the water. If you thought taking a dip in the ocean would cool you down - nope, it's a giant bath tub over there.
My tap water varies between 4.5 (March) and 8 degrees (September) C during the year when using a very low flow rate. At the highest possible flow rate, it varies between 6.5 and 7.5 degrees C (source of water is 90 meters below ground and water pipes 1.5 meters below the surface). So it obvious varies at different places around the globe.
I would be interested in how the blocks look long term. Tap water is typically chlorinated to keep things from growing in the pipes with a little extra chlorine to ensure there is enough when water stands in pipes for long periods. Chlorine and its ions are happy to attack copper. In a normal closed loop, the chlorine will all bond and the chemical attack will stop. In this kind of open loop, you have continuous addition of fresh chlorinated water to continually attack the blocks. I don't think it would be a quick process, but long term, the fins and plate of a block could become corroded.
I had a similar idea with a 230 liter stainless steel barrel as a radiator. You need a pump for this, but you can use the barrel without fans. And you might hide the pump under the water, to lower pump noise level.
Well that is how power plants do cooling. They take water from rivers for cooling. I would not use tap water but I was thinking to use water from the water well in my garden. :) It is pretty cold and it is almost free. The only cost is the electric water pump.
I would add an inline descaler to this to prevent the buildup and filter out impurities. Only issue I have with this is the water tubes going from the bathroom or kitchen to your room with the computer. Gonna be a hassle to disconnect and drain the water from the tube every time you want to use the bathroom privately. You could do metal piping the same way as done for water elements for heating the rooms but then you have to add the energy cost for that. Linus did a similar thing with his whole room water cooling with copper pipes in his old house. The return of the warmed up water could be used as floor heating and maybe toilet flush water to lessen the energy cost for the pipes.
Very interesting topic and I like how you compared energy costs for production of components. I live in Scotland where we aren't charged for water consumption on a per litre basis. We pay a flat fee for municipal services and part of that includes water supply. Our water temperature is good 4 to 5 degrees lower than Berlin's and will be much cooler in more rural areas. Great work.
I'm pretty sure it had something to do with this being a promotional system that would be going to the winner of the corsair contest. I'm not sure the winner would be feel comfortable with the PC having been in someones bathroom, no matter how clean they claim it is.
Ummm because he is makeing a video......you needs light and sound optimization imagine what it would sound like a echo chamber if he filmed in his bathroom, not to mention space for everything....
@@samgoff5289 I said move it closer, not necessarily into the bathroom. I also don't have to imagine what it would look or sound like if he filmed in his bathroom, part of this video already was... And yes when it comes to main content getting proper lighting and sound is a must even if it's just a basic level, but it is still perfectly acceptable to have the occasional video not meet that standard depending on the content in the video.
I have towel warmer that uses hot water, but it goes around water meter. So it doesn't really matter have many litters per day it uses, it's just part of the loop. I think you can do the same with cold water and move 99% of water price and energy requirements out of equation since you're not removing it from pipes, just heating up a little bit.
I've had my radiators in a separate box for years, with quick disconnect hoses connecting the box to the PC. Lately I've been considering ways to pipe the heat outside so the air conditioning doesnt have to fight against my PC as hard. This open loop concept is one i hadnt considered.
In Oberbayern the tap water is very cold but also very high on minerals, so independent liquid cycle with thermal transfer point would be needed, but then even smaller amount of water would be needed
Depends on the area in terms of whether it's "wasteful". For US folks west of the Mississippi of southern states it would be terrible. Where I'm from water is so cheap they don't even charge for it in my condo complex. I did something similar to cool my entire office using a Mazda 6 radiator, a solenoid operated valve, a zigbee wall socket iot switch and a zigbee iot temperature sensor. I set the solenoid operated valve to open at 78F degrees and to close at 76F and hooked a fan that blew through the radiator at the same time. My home assistant gave me metrics on how often it was on and basically on a hot day to drop my office down to 76 from 78 was about 10 minutes and it would cycle 3 or 4 times a day. Sounds bad taking 3 to 4 showers a day until I noticed that my AC unit was staying off an hour or so a day. That means I'm saving roughly 3kWh's of power and the energy and the comparable energy to deliver water via municipal systems is minimal for the amount of water I'm dealing with. So in my very specific case I save energy but not water so if I was in a state where water is a premium may not be a smart idea but in the Midwest or in/around the great lakes, this is a viable option. And that's for a full sized office. Cooling a single computer you could throttle the flow rate and save more water.
I remember a friend had a geothermal heating and cooling unit for his house that would pump up water from his well, heat or cool his house then dump it back into the well hole. Very power efficient and environmentally friendly.
Would be a cool project to build a system where you collect the warm "waste" water in an insulated tank, and feed your water heater from that. That way you are using the waste heat of your pc(s) to partially warm your baths :)
At my uni, there is a big open-air reservoir of water, which is used to cool not only lab equipment, but also the buildings themselves. Used water is going back to the reservoir and the whole thing is cooled at night (in winter to the cold Dutch ambient and in summer though cooling installations)
If you live in an apartment, how about connecting your loop to the central heating. Sure the water temp would be around 50 Celcius (said to be the average in Sweden), thereby introducing heat to the loop but with proper flow maybe your cpu/gpu would not get much hotter than that, while at the same time you are sending your heat into the central heating system thereby saving energy.
If you could somehow tap into the water supply that comes out of a sewage treatment plant you could do this without using drinking water. At least in my city, the sewage tratment plant cleans the water until it's almost indistinguishable from fresh water. It isn't drinking water though - it gets cleaned like that in order to be released into the Rhein, our nearby river. I'd wager the Rhein doesn't care if the water it receives from pipes went through some cooling systems prior. Could be an interesting way to hook up data centers, perhaps that would reduce their cooling energy consumption.
i had actually wondered about this exact set up for a while , tap water is cold , flow controlled , perfect ,and as others have said it reminds me of loops ive seen with reservoirs or pools outside , but the best way i can think of would be to put a copper coil attached to the loop in your toilet cistern , it would keep the coolant sperate from the tap water , and would get regular fresh water , it already contains a high volume of water anyway and the heat would also slowly dissipate through the cold porcelain acting as a radiator the only issue would be getting the tubes into the bathroom and keeping them out of the way of the door and stuff as it ould be a mor permanent set up , still this would definitely be economical and energy saving and i wonder how well it would perform in the long run (after a while of no flushes how well does a toilet work as a radiator) edit after some research they already do this in some data centres and it works , this could be the greenest way to cool your pc
@@nickfrankling5184 no you build a loop , with a copper coil in the tank , the coolant never leaves the system , and new minerals and contaminants wont make their way into the loop
You could use the heat from the pc to trigger a heat pump (inverter or not) and "absorb" That heat to transfer it to the central heating of the house. THAT would be awesome for building with lots of computers working co-generation.
When I was a teen many years ago with no air conditioning I built a cooler for my room using a heater core hooked to a garden hose. It worked surprisingly well because the water from our well was pretty cold.
We don’t usually cool our components (Laser and Turbo pumps) with tap water because of the corrosion that can occur inside. Turbos and Lasers cost 10-100k or more and so it’s better to just run a closed loop. you could filter the water but it’s not worth pinching pennies when there is so much on the line.
im curious. if you buy a 1000L water pallet. put it outside out of the sun. put a small pump on it like you use in your pc. you could use that loop with no problem i would say. the mass will not warm up but you will have an almost limitless supply of cold water
When comes to strange cooling solutions, i use MORA3 outside in summer, i move it inside for winter heating, in two locations. And my friend have a miner with 3x 1080 Ti watercooled, heating floor heating in winter. That is working great, Card are like 35 C max, producing like 1kW of heat.
if you have a swimming pool, I think it could be used to warm the pool by using the PC using the same method, rather than using the tap water since the volume of water is quite large it is slow to increase the average temperature of the pool.
@Roman, people have done simlar cooling buy runing water through a large metal tank such as a old propane tank buried in the garden ( any large metal tank would do). But either all aluminium or copper would to match your water blocks would keep galvanic corrosion at bay etc. I think Linus did a vid where he used an old large house radiator, huge capacity and took hours or a day to just warm up the water.
Using tap water is also very common in chemistry labs (if you want to reflux a liquid and not lose it you'll use a water cooled condenser), although for environmental reasons many labs now have closed water circuits. But sometimes you want to do reactions at lower temperatures, there are cryostats that can cool down to -70C and are connected via tubing. But I'm not sure if they could handle the heat output of a CPU, but would be interesting to try.
Hey der8aur!! There is for sure a very environmentally beneficial way to do this, but only if you live in certain cold places, such as canada, alaska, scandinavia, or somewhere like in the mountains like the alps. Which is rather than to use tap water, just run a large closed loop reserviour outside the building. And keep recirculating that same water back outside again. Then by the time it comes back through the loop it will have been cooled by the outside weather. Whatever the ambient condition is. This of course also works too for warmer countries, but only during the winter months. Finally there is a 3rd possible option which depends on local geology. Which only works if you have a nearby geological feature at a lower temperature - then pass the water underground. However the temperature can also be higher underground too. So that does not always work. Generally if the rocks in the earth have a time delay in them, that they still are cold from the previous wintertime months. Or if the rocks nearby have a water table or underground streams. To bring the temperature down. Finally if you live nearby to a coastline, or a lake. Or a stream. Then you can maybe pass your own enclosed water pipes through those other external water features. Or submerge there a heat exchanger. You then pump yourself your closed loop through. And get your colder water. How to power the pump? Well perhaps a water wheel? That can run off from the same stream. Not everybody has the possibility do these things. However perhaps a lot of people can do seaonal winter time cooling by taking their loops partways outside the building.
The best use sounds like avoiding using a chiller a few days a year, otherwise I would be concerned about the life of the cooling block (clogging). I'd love to get some usable hot water this way, though.
Follow-up video pls: Take a giant reservoir (drum-size or similar) find at which amount of water you could use it without a radiator- perhaps calculate the wattage in relation to volume of the water.
The heated water could also feed into an IBC container for example, which you could then use to clean with, to flush the toilet or water plants. Or just take a bath at the end of the day 😝
The 121 L/d is only in private houses. This does not include the water used to produce the stuff we buy. Something like meat has a very high fresh water use (not just rain water). A single burger is way more than the 121 L.
Run the water to your hot water tank. Double efficient. Save power heating hot water. You could also run the spent water through the ground to cool it off and recycle it.
Here tap water is at 6°C so yes it would be a cool solution to have an automatic charge discharge system that replace hot water with cold one when the reservoir temperature goes to hi. Or have an heater exchange.
I considered doing this at one point. Between the livestock and the garden, we go through more water than your estimate per day through the summer, just need a holding tank to even out the supply. Only catch is the water is incredibly "hard", calcium and iron. Would be pretty bad for the components I think. If we ever move to where the water is better though, it's certainly a consideration.
Haa! My landlord has 20m3 underground rain water storage, always cooled by surrounding earth. Only problem is that it does contains a little particulates of biomatter, so cleaning blocks would be a constant chore... also sometimes there is an outbreak of anaerobic growth that makes water smell bad. I would just pump the water back into the storage tank so no losses. I've had this plan to zinc coat a few big steel tubes and just bury it in the garden... then recirculate clean water.
Water outlet could connect to your garden or outside tank for the garden then you would have almost zero waste. I really enjoyed this unusual episode and exploring the ideas.
Thinking about it a bit I would think there may be a more sustainable way to do this. Long term calcification / gunking up of the microfins will be a major concern. However it may still be possible if you add a pump and a radiator, then cool the radiator with tapwater to achieve similar temperatures. It would make it a full custom water loop minus the fans, but it should not differ too much in temperature and would be less prone to gunk building up.
An other idea that would be safer than tap water running in a water block is to use a closed loop cooler that uses a small rad to exchange heat into the flow of tap water. Then have the heated up tap water feed a household hot water system, pre heating the water a bit and saving on hot water power usage.
What about an hybrid system? So when doing heavy loads, you switch to tap water, when idling you switch back to a water loop. That way you basically only run for an hour or so. You don't need such low temperatures for 6 hours a day on average!
Or just put your radiator into a tub with the tap water. That way your components only contact distilled water. Whenever the water in the tub gets too warm the tap gets turned on to replace the warm water with cold water. Warm water gets used to flush the toilets etc.
The minimum flow for water cooling is said to be 1 l/min, so 60 l/hour. Tap water costs ~2.5 EUR per m³=1000 liters, so 0.25 cents per liter. That's 15 cents per hour in water. Let's say the PC uses 150 W on average (we're talking about a watercooled gaming PC after all, so more gaming, less idle), at 30 cents per kWh that means one hour costs ~5 cents in electricity. So with fixed flow tap water cooling the running costs are quadrupled or so.
tap water may be very corrosive due to the additives. it will be cool because ur starting with cooler water. but essentially, all u really need is for the water entering the water blocks to be as cold as possible.
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And even you can reuse the water. Collect it in some tank and use it to pressure wash your car for example or water the garden.
Cool the PC then straight into the garden sprinkler.
This ^ you could use the waste water for all sorts of things. Water tank in the house for shower ect.
@@rompdude Yes
You know, wash the car every few hours? Water the garden non-stop??
Copper-die-contaminated water might not be that good for your plants. Remember the die cooler is made to have a very large contact area with the water streaming through it, so you would get a lot more copper-contamination from the heated copper ribs.
Adding a self-adjusting valve that opens up in response to temps would make the efficiency of this would go through the roof.
You can use the pwm from the mobo + an Arduino and a valve
taking seawater even more....this party compensates the effect of melting ice on the north pole :-)
damn lol, dont you hate when you scroll down and the comment your about to write is the 1st comment you read. Top idea
Also, if we actually collected and used the generated heat instead of disspating it, we would theoretically have 100% efficiency. Just like a car in the winter uses a part of the heat generated by the engine to keep the interior warm.
@@lakiza55 plumb it in to your houses existing water radiation heat. genius.
I was expecting some dumb video aka lttstyle. But, I got a full lesson on the environmental impact of PC cooling instead.
😂💪
That's why you watch ltt for the lulz, der8auer or GN for the science
@@der8auer forgive him, he must be new.
@@der8auer dont know if you knew this, but Lenovo makes a server rack consisting of like 12 blade servers, and its cooled by hooking into city water. Lenovo advertises that you can use the heated water to heat your company building, by radiated heat, instead of using a heat pump or some other dedicated heater. So its 100% efficient. These servers are used often in stock market companies, as the cold water lets the processors hold clockspeeds of 5GHz almost constantly. Being even a few milliseconds faster on the new stock price changes can make a tremendous difference in your company's profit margins. The Lenovo server is called the ThinkSystem SD650 High-Density if you want to look it up.
@@der8auer i have an idea that might be good to be done with pc cooling and i hope that you can try it. i have done it in the past and i think that it will work. if you are interested in my idea let me know so that i explain it to you in a message please
LTT did something similar but you took it to the next level, the energy usage analysis was so interesting!
Now pipe this into an insulated reservoir - something like a water heater/geyser.
Or into a buffered solar water heating loop after use.
Save on your hot water heating costs :D
This would be a great idea, but that depends on people actually using the hot water in the house. Otherwise, it would just be one massive heatsink
@@NoorquackerInd Or just hook the output to a tank and then to the intake of the toilets, dishwasher and laundry machines....I don't think the heat is the meaningful part.
@@c.m.7692 Yes if the water was reused then I think you could have a clear conscience.
@@c.m.7692
you could do both. Heat Exchange the the Heat back out for something useful (Heat, Thermal differential Generator), then use the final waste Water to run some Appliances, yes. bonus points if you can take advantage of Gravity to use a small Turbine. falling one Floor or so without much Head Pressure wouldn't get a lot out of a Turbine, but it would be something.
Oh, and one more thing about this (because I've actually run a setup similar to this before - albeit through a water-water heat-exchanger)...
You would definitely want to use some solenoid valves (electronically controlled valves) for both convenience and safety reasons.
They come in 12V and are cheap on ebay ect., so using a "default off" solenoid you can make the water flow automatically when the PC has power.
If you put the solenoid near the water-source in a more "leak safe" area then you also remove a lot of the potential for any water-damage from a leak while the system is unattended.
Lastly - if you wanted to get real fancy with it - using a few chokes and solenoids you could pretty easily set up some switches that could regulate the water-flow to 2-3 different flow-levels depending on your demand. I suppose you could even automate to respond to computer temps, but I never got quite that far :)
Yea if the pc is idle you can go to like 1L/h and you can use the warm water to like wash your hands
In theory you can just make a tank for the water and distribute it all over your house and have a system if the tank Will be low it will switch to normal supply of water
@@dan2800 Have it dump into your water heater. Wouldn't take as much energy to heat the water and your pc gets cooled.
i got a ML rig with 6 gpus with a heat exchanger connected to my floorheating, my gpus are cool and I save on heating in autumn and winter.
My first impression is that it will create limescale on cooling fins, over time.
That's why all the major water cooler manufacturers recommend Calgon " Every PC runs cooler with Calgon!"
Cars don’t limescale yo
@@planespeaking hahaha.
That is because the do not have tap water but distilled water with additives.
and the car reuses the water and dont get new water all the time, and it`s not that mutch lime in there.
Depends on the water, soft water will cause corrosion because it’s more acidic, hard water will lead to limescale buildup, you can put a inline filter in between the tap and pc.
Back in the day before we had refrigeration, during the winter months people would collect as much snow and ice as they could. Then they'd dig a hole maybe a few metres deep (but even 1m is enough for a small amount) and fill it with the ice/snow. Then in the summer months they'd put food below it, surrounded by hay (to prevent ice burn), then cover the top in hay as well. For larger ones they'd dig a tunnel to it so they could actually put the food directly under it. With much less than even a cubic metre of ice/snow, the ice/snow would usually stay there all throughout the summer months and make it all the way to winter.
I've thought before about doing the same thing today, except running a loop through the snow/ice instead. And also obviously being able to fill and top it up anytime you like. I haven't done any back of the envelope calculations, and it's obviously not going to last several months like it would normally. But if you had a cubic metre of ice/snow i'm sure it'd still last ages. It could make a very low temperature loop for super cheap and also being environmentally friendly.
I don't know how plausible and effecting it'd be. It'd certainly be *cool* though.
The stately house in our town has the old "Ice House" for people to see. A partially covered/underground cellar for storing snow and ice and food.
The difference is food doesn't generate heat but your pc cooling loop would be actively dumping hundreds of watts of heat into the ice. I'd be surprised if the ice lasts for a day.
@@OTechnology Yes but it also takes an awful lot of energy to heat up water or ice.
It would cost more but there is already a solution that basically uses these principles that have been in use for exchanging heat for nearly 50 years; ground heat exchangers. That system that you described is a fridge based on the fact that the once you get down past the layer of dirt that absorbs the majority of the heat on the surface, the earth is fairly stable temperature-wise all year long. It's generally somewhere between 50F to 60F depending, on location; that's lower than the tap water temp in this video. All you would need to do is run a long length of tubing a few feet under the ground and hook it up to a pump that circulates it. When it comes to the systems that are used for controlling temperatures in homes or greenhouses, you need a couple hundred to a couple thousand feet of tubing snaked back and forth; you could get away with far less if it's just for a PC. In theory, you could even just with air cooling with ductwork instead of tubing for liquid as the air will be fairly cool once runs through the underground system.
@@aprisia That's amazing. I think it would be worth the work to lay the piping all over your yard for this project. Would possibly need city permits for that much digging. On the permit description just say using for a green house garden, ha.
I have done this in the past using my large rainwater tank, I live in Ireland so I rarely ran out ;-) if you live in an apartment its not viable but anybody who lives in a house can have a 200L barrel to catch rain water. you can also run a small pump to go back to the barrel, the pc takes a long time to heat 200L of water (Again I'm in Ireland, I dont know what it would be like in spain and my tank is 1000L)
I only stopped because it froze one winter and burst all my pipes, a small bit of effort with insulation could have prevented that.
You should have ran it continuously and faster to prevent freezing :D
@@Philip8888888 Or even loop it back in winter
Indeed depends on how much water and if you can use the waste water for things like watering plants and save it for flush water.
it also depends if the water you're using is from a river or if it's fossil water: ok in first place, bad in the latter
The water doesn't necessarily need to go down the drain. You could catch the water and use it to fill a tank for irrigating a garden or other uses. A good filter will make sure your waterblock doesn't gunk up.
first thoughts before watching the vid: the waste of water is not that high, imagine the amount you "waste" when flushing the toilet. if i remember correctly ltt did a video about that but as always they didn't go into details. The long term effects might be interesting because, well, it's not purified.
samehedi you could send the water to a bucket and use that to flush your toilet.
Slab cooling works well also, run heaps of copper pipe through your house slab when its poured
Here in the US we have homeowners using geothermal heating to supplement their heat in the winter because the underground temperatures are near constant. I have always thought a geothermal loop to cool a pc would be interesting too. You would need a pump but the loop would function as a giant radiator. I would think it would perform similarly.
I feel like that you are right, you are wasting pure drinkable water. But look this on the good side. By using the tape water you are sending back clean water into the sewer which does make the waste water every so slightly cleaner when it reach the building that filter the water.
My tap water are +5°c.
I tested that 20y ago, filled bathtub with it, and bathed after no losses created !
bathtub can serve as a reservoir for testing. use it as a reservoir + a cheap big water pump.
you can check how much water is needed to cool a PC if loop size doesn't matter. for constant usage a bath tab can be replaced with a plastic water tank.
This is great in theory unless you're getting your water from flint and the lead in the water reacts with the copper in the water block and suddenly you're mixing metals.
1. Make a closed loop of piping in the earth at 5+ feet
3. Route hoses or pipes out and into your living space with a pump somewhere in there
4. Use what you just built to exchange heat with the ground
i run tap water on my test bench when i need to push it harder as dice and ln2 is way overpriced where i live ($10 per kilo of dice and $9 per liter of ln2). average water temp here is like 5-11c so when i was ocing gtx 580's on direct die liquid metal they wouldnt go above 23c, this was with i think 1.45v core (volt modded) @ 1050mhz. was a huge help and it earnt me 1st place on 1080p extreme super position many times during a battle with a guy from Argentina but he end up winning with asic quality. it is a big waste of water but its far cheaper than dice or ln2 but it also cant achieve those temps.
For testing this method is incredibly useful, and I would add you do not have to waste the water it can easily be piped into five gallon buckets. Then could be used to manually flush toilets, water plants, or cleaning. Since the water would have been used anyway it is effectively free cooling.
I was literally thinking if this was possible yesterday, less than 24 hours later you post this. Weird, but awesome!
Hi, we use a pump to water the garden. Our pipe what goes into the ground is ca.60m deep. The water temp is 14c. Even on the hottest day or at winter too. Our pump uses 750w of energy to lift the water. I mean: if you use the pump to water your garden you can use some of the flow for cooling stuff or even cool a tank of coolant (like a reversed boiler). We typically water our garden like 3-5hours a day, and if you use the full flow to cool a tank of coolant, you can use the stored "heat" to cool your stuff, and the next day, you cool it off again. (our pump is capable of 3000l/hour)
coming from Australia where drought is common (especially in regional areas), you cannot compare energy equivalents.
especially when it comes to usable drinking water.
but it's a cool concept.
also makes me think, what about areas which have hard water (water high in minerals), they would have problems with build up in the loop.
Soft water - corrosion, Hard water - buildup.
@@MrKonquer these loops are built to run with distilled water, so corrosion from soft water is not a concern. as for hard water, a little bit of vinegar ever few weeks will keep things super clean.
@Michael Roy even pure distilled water with a ph of 7 will eventually turn slightly acidic, water absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere turning it from 7 to about 5.8/9, a sacrificial anode is usually what’s used in soft water treatments which come into contact with metals such as the cooling plate itself.
Such as the bottom of ships and inside water heaters.
In central heating systems adding inhibitors is also a way to stop corrosion happening.
@@michaelroy1631 The water here is too hard for that. You could vinegar it every day though. :P
@@TechyBen Do NOT add vinegar to ANYTHING that contains copper!
It will completely corrode the copper to bits until there are holes in it!
Mount a radiator outside is what I do, saves on running aircon in the room about 3 months of the year and in winter i can adjust (with Argus) the loop temp with the pump speed to the outside radiator, works well with no issues, the other option i have seen is drop the outside radiator in a rainwater tank
Why didn't you just use a garden hose instead of daisy-chaining ZMT tubing? :D
some places has tubing for "gray water", it is basically rain water or unclean to drink, but is used for washing and irrigation.
A little bit of filtering and you can just recirculate the hot water back in the system as gray water again!
And when gray water became scarce, you can compensate with tap water
Bad idea in the long run. Because: Calcium deposits like in a washing machine at the hot components if your water quality is wrong.
use calgon :o
@@smachine3811 not funny
Clean it with vinegar every now and then
Did similar way back in 2007, our water is unmetered and we just pay a yearly amount irrespective of how much we use...
Had a rig in fully submerged mineral oil setup, i had a radiator at the rear inside the oil that had a constant stream of cold mains water running through it at about a litre per minute...always kept it very cool, compleatly silent and completely dust free.
A system that sends the water that went through your PC into your water heater, laundry, and toilet tanks would be interesting.
Do your tap water energy consumption figures account for chemicals and materials used in processing the water or just water facility energy consumption? Granted, you said your radiator figures don't include copper production and other things. I'm wondering how representative these numbers are of reality. An interesting topic though. I think you're right that it's better to do this than use a chiller for a few days, but long term use by every pc enthusiast is likely worse than a closed loop.
You could just have your radiator in your toilets water tub. Whenever someone uses the toilet the warm water gets replaced with cold water. This also lets you flow destilled water through your radiator and pc components. If you dont use the toilet enough you could auto flush it at a given temperature.
Flushing your toilet uses about 10l of water. To heat these 10l from 18C to a point where it does not keep your pc cold enough under normal gaming loads. (assume 35C) would take 313.2 Wh. Depending on the Power consumption of your pc while gaming this would mean that you would only have to flush the toilet once every hour to keep your pc cooled.
@@Max_xaM Don't even need to flush, have a thermostat bypass the fill valve at a given water temperature and let the overflow drain do its job dumping hot water at the top into the bowl. Better make double-sure the toilet does not clog when people flush though since water will keep coming while nobody is there to stop it.
In the mid 1990's a friend of mine used a radiator and cooling loop with methanol to cool a Cyrix686 which ran HOT and he got a 25-30 degree F temp reduction
2021: Everybody needs a water connection in their desk area and Prebuilt pcs come with built in ice cube machines.
exactly what I was thinking. LOL
I did something similar before and the main difference is the flow rate. I hooked up a well pump in a pull configuration (for obvious reasons) and it dropped temps to ambient and kept them there no matter what I did. The faster you can remove heat, the better performance you get. You just have to deal with the crazy noise of a very high horse power pump or in your situation water waste.
Imagine opening or cutting the water flow brutally, creating a pressure wave that rips the tubing off the water block and flood the PC case
I don't think water hammer would be much of a problem at those flow rates tbh.
Thanks for this video, was thinking about using house water.
There are 2 issues with the approach.
1. If water coming form the city is dirty (if city does any work, and some soil gets into it.
2. Water minerals
Another option to not "waste" water is.
1. get a heat exchange tank. (tank with two seperate input/output loops - use copper pipe within a tank). Where water coming into the house and water in the loop are not mixed, but heat is exchanged. Then you get cold temps into the loop and you heat up a large tank of cold water, that can be used in house. And the computer loop will not be affected by quality of water.
That is somethign I want to do in the house, and your results affirmed that it is a very good idea.
Thanks
Depending on your tap water, wouldn't this cause long term damage to the waterblocks, especially if the tap water is especially hard leaving calcium/lime deposits?
yes but that's a veeeeeeeery long time and also citric acid exists.
And just buy two of each block , swap over when performance drops , clean the removed blocks ready for next swap . But I think it would take an awfully long time to limescale up . Or have a limescale remover flush through the system , switching this contaminated water to waste . Once flushed through switch back returning back to main tank
what do you think water pipes are made from man? Copper! And they last for Decades!
yes, but you can add a filter in the way.
It's a common cooling solution in commercial applications. Hotels use it in the air conditioning sometimes because of space constrains or local building "codes" preventing outdoor condensers for the ac. Water cooled ice machines are also very common
Well, well, well, my, my, my... Hardware store. Here. I. Come.
Initial thoughts, I'm a generator tech and while not widely used any more there are still units out there that are city-water cooled. They just use a liquid to liquid intercooler, and are usually pretty effective at keeping the engines cool.
I know your recommendation for this setup is directed towards extreme overclockers but I wonder if a setup used like this long-term will have nasty buildup or corrosion of components due to differing standards of tap water by country.
german tap water is filtered to food saftey standards
Where I live in the UK we have very hard water, I suspect it would be a yearly job descaling the blocks. Maybe it could be an easy attachable loop filled with vinegar or something. Those quick disconnects would work well for that.
@@rompdude hmm if someone can figure out a way to implement this without being wastefull they may be able to use a filter in the setup to prevent that
@@user-y6f Food safety standards do not mean there is nothing in the water. Calcium being the big one, Perfectly healthy but defestating for the microfins in a water block.
@@Shinobu420asdf totally true but anyone who cared enough to do something like this would probably use copper components. The only aluminum blocks I'm aware of are from EK's cheaper fluid gaming line
You are spot on with this cooling. The only difference to my system is that I don't want the tap water into my PC parts so I use a stainless steel heat exchanger in-between. I love that you put in all the facts and figures into the video to really show the numbers, however I would have liked to see the difference of water usage of apartments compared with a house.
when the video is so new, that it doesn't even appear on the youtube channel 😂
I work on Emergency Industrial generators. Some use heat exchanges with city tap water run through them. Some smaller ones use marine water cooled exhaust and intake manifolds the only difference clean city water is used over salt or pond water like the boat would use. I have been thinking about using a geothermal loop. You should look into it. Houses use a underground loop for heating and cooling as the earth at a certain depth it always around 50 deg. F. So it works for heating and cooling. If you want your house at 70 on a 20 deg day you only need to heat 20 deg as you have a free 50 deg from the earth . It works the same in cooling. If its 80 outside you have a free 50 degree source to flow though the coil in your air handler. I think burying a loop of coiled pipe or reusing a piece of a forced hot water radiant wall strip buried vertical in your cooling loop would work to cool a pc.
My initial reaction is the level of salts, minerals and the occasional dirt in the water...
Filter
What kind of tap water do you have where you live ?
german tap water is sometimes better then bottled water. Minerals could be only problems
The issue is plumbing for many, I imagine. Unless you store your rig in the bathroom (eek, shower steam) with cables run through the wall to an office, you'd have to run pipes/drains probably, which changes the cost difference.
Capture the water coming out and use it to flush your toilets.
You better eat a lot! (one flush is 4liters)
Here in central AB, Canada, our tap water peaks in temperature during summer at about 12°C, but in during the winter (especially during January and February when temperatures reach sustained -30-40°C) the water is just a couple degrees above 0°C. My family does a lot of home brewing of beer, and we use a Blichmann Therminator counter-flow plate chiller to take the hot wort down from boiling to just blow room temperature. The water goes from just a few degrees to scalding coming out the other end.
Home brewers in hotter climates have a lot of problems meeting their cooling needs, but this is not a problem we have up here.
in my place, my tap water temperature during the day reaches 30 celcius, and at night around 25 C
@@sonacphotos i know, yeah, but i think its normal in asia :D
@Sonac Thermodynamics. The ground gets incredibly warm in some parts of Asia and in Africa as well.
@@sonacphotos Totally normal in Brazil for example, if it's hot outside all day every day you'll eventually warm up the water. If you thought taking a dip in the ocean would cool you down - nope, it's a giant bath tub over there.
My tap water varies between 4.5 (March) and 8 degrees (September) C during the year when using a very low flow rate. At the highest possible flow rate, it varies between 6.5 and 7.5 degrees C (source of water is 90 meters below ground and water pipes 1.5 meters below the surface).
So it obvious varies at different places around the globe.
I would be interested in how the blocks look long term. Tap water is typically chlorinated to keep things from growing in the pipes with a little extra chlorine to ensure there is enough when water stands in pipes for long periods. Chlorine and its ions are happy to attack copper. In a normal closed loop, the chlorine will all bond and the chemical attack will stop. In this kind of open loop, you have continuous addition of fresh chlorinated water to continually attack the blocks. I don't think it would be a quick process, but long term, the fins and plate of a block could become corroded.
THE CITY WATER COMPANY LIKES THIS VIDEO
I had a similar idea with a 230 liter stainless steel barrel as a radiator. You need a pump for this, but you can use the barrel without fans. And you might hide the pump under the water, to lower pump noise level.
What about minerals deposition in the loop?
citric acid
@@emperorSbraz I can't keep maintaining the loop every month or 2 because my area's water is mineral rich.
Well that is how power plants do cooling. They take water from rivers for cooling.
I would not use tap water but I was thinking to use water from the water well in my garden. :)
It is pretty cold and it is almost free. The only cost is the electric water pump.
Imagine If this started leaking while you were away, if you left it to render a project or something. Whoops now your whole flat is under water.
I would add an inline descaler to this to prevent the buildup and filter out impurities.
Only issue I have with this is the water tubes going from the bathroom or kitchen to your room with the computer.
Gonna be a hassle to disconnect and drain the water from the tube every time you want to use the bathroom privately.
You could do metal piping the same way as done for water elements for heating the rooms but then you have to add the energy cost for that.
Linus did a similar thing with his whole room water cooling with copper pipes in his old house.
The return of the warmed up water could be used as floor heating and maybe toilet flush water to lessen the energy cost for the pipes.
This computer just join bigger loop. Earth water circle
🤣🤣
Very interesting topic and I like how you compared energy costs for production of components. I live in Scotland where we aren't charged for water consumption on a per litre basis. We pay a flat fee for municipal services and part of that includes water supply. Our water temperature is good 4 to 5 degrees lower than Berlin's and will be much cooler in more rural areas. Great work.
Wait why didn't you just move the computer closer rather than run the loop across your apartment xD
I'm pretty sure it had something to do with this being a promotional system that would be going to the winner of the corsair contest. I'm not sure the winner would be feel comfortable with the PC having been in someones bathroom, no matter how clean they claim it is.
but then there's no excuse to order 10 boxes of tubes lol
Ummm because he is makeing a video......you needs light and sound optimization imagine what it would sound like a echo chamber if he filmed in his bathroom, not to mention space for everything....
@@samgoff5289 I said move it closer, not necessarily into the bathroom. I also don't have to imagine what it would look or sound like if he filmed in his bathroom, part of this video already was... And yes when it comes to main content getting proper lighting and sound is a must even if it's just a basic level, but it is still perfectly acceptable to have the occasional video not meet that standard depending on the content in the video.
I have towel warmer that uses hot water, but it goes around water meter. So it doesn't really matter have many litters per day it uses, it's just part of the loop.
I think you can do the same with cold water and move 99% of water price and energy requirements out of equation since you're not removing it from pipes, just heating up a little bit.
This is how servers farm water cooling works.
nah...they use heat exchangers cooled by sea water, rivers or what ever... they do not waste drinking water
@@PL-wh4ov all water that doesn't have salt is drinking water. You mean tap water?
I've had my radiators in a separate box for years, with quick disconnect hoses connecting the box to the PC. Lately I've been considering ways to pipe the heat outside so the air conditioning doesnt have to fight against my PC as hard. This open loop concept is one i hadnt considered.
Linus did video about this...yeah it's waste of water :D
In Oberbayern the tap water is very cold but also very high on minerals, so independent liquid cycle with thermal transfer point would be needed, but then even smaller amount of water would be needed
Watch linus media group try this think it was jake and Alex who tried it, it works just not practical
Depends on the area in terms of whether it's "wasteful". For US folks west of the Mississippi of southern states it would be terrible. Where I'm from water is so cheap they don't even charge for it in my condo complex.
I did something similar to cool my entire office using a Mazda 6 radiator, a solenoid operated valve, a zigbee wall socket iot switch and a zigbee iot temperature sensor. I set the solenoid operated valve to open at 78F degrees and to close at 76F and hooked a fan that blew through the radiator at the same time. My home assistant gave me metrics on how often it was on and basically on a hot day to drop my office down to 76 from 78 was about 10 minutes and it would cycle 3 or 4 times a day.
Sounds bad taking 3 to 4 showers a day until I noticed that my AC unit was staying off an hour or so a day. That means I'm saving roughly 3kWh's of power and the energy and the comparable energy to deliver water via municipal systems is minimal for the amount of water I'm dealing with.
So in my very specific case I save energy but not water so if I was in a state where water is a premium may not be a smart idea but in the Midwest or in/around the great lakes, this is a viable option.
And that's for a full sized office. Cooling a single computer you could throttle the flow rate and save more water.
This is such a waste. A kid in Africa could be gaming on that PC. smh.
every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passed
I remember a friend had a geothermal heating and cooling unit for his house that would pump up water from his well, heat or cool his house then dump it back into the well hole. Very power efficient and environmentally friendly.
Nein
Doch
@@milan437 nein
Would be a cool project to build a system where you collect the warm "waste" water in an insulated tank, and feed your water heater from that. That way you are using the waste heat of your pc(s) to partially warm your baths :)
At my uni, there is a big open-air reservoir of water, which is used to cool not only lab equipment, but also the buildings themselves. Used water is going back to the reservoir and the whole thing is cooled at night (in winter to the cold Dutch ambient and in summer though cooling installations)
thanks for spending so much time on the efficiency/sustainability aspect! really interesting stuff and also responsible given the state of things
If you live in an apartment, how about connecting your loop to the central heating. Sure the water temp would be around 50 Celcius (said to be the average in Sweden), thereby introducing heat to the loop but with proper flow maybe your cpu/gpu would not get much hotter than that, while at the same time you are sending your heat into the central heating system thereby saving energy.
If you could somehow tap into the water supply that comes out of a sewage treatment plant you could do this without using drinking water. At least in my city, the sewage tratment plant cleans the water until it's almost indistinguishable from fresh water. It isn't drinking water though - it gets cleaned like that in order to be released into the Rhein, our nearby river. I'd wager the Rhein doesn't care if the water it receives from pipes went through some cooling systems prior. Could be an interesting way to hook up data centers, perhaps that would reduce their cooling energy consumption.
i had actually wondered about this exact set up for a while , tap water is cold , flow controlled , perfect ,and as others have said it reminds me of loops ive seen with reservoirs or pools outside , but the best way i can think of would be to put a copper coil attached to the loop in your toilet cistern , it would keep the coolant sperate from the tap water , and would get regular fresh water , it already contains a high volume of water anyway and the heat would also slowly dissipate through the cold porcelain acting as a radiator
the only issue would be getting the tubes into the bathroom and keeping them out of the way of the door and stuff as it ould be a mor permanent set up , still this would definitely be economical and energy saving and i wonder how well it would perform in the long run (after a while of no flushes how well does a toilet work as a radiator)
edit after some research they already do this in some data centres and it works , this could be the greenest way to cool your pc
Just return the water to the cold tank , no waste then .
@@nickfrankling5184 no you build a loop , with a copper coil in the tank , the coolant never leaves the system , and new minerals and contaminants wont make their way into the loop
this is really not bad if you are going to have a pc at the same spot. the tap water can be collected and go to the toliet, shower etc
You could use the heat from the pc to trigger a heat pump (inverter or not) and "absorb" That heat to transfer it to the central heating of the house. THAT would be awesome for building with lots of computers working co-generation.
When I was a teen many years ago with no air conditioning I built a cooler for my room using a heater core hooked to a garden hose. It worked surprisingly well because the water from our well was pretty cold.
We don’t usually cool our components (Laser and Turbo pumps) with tap water because of the corrosion that can occur inside. Turbos and Lasers cost 10-100k or more and so it’s better to just run a closed loop. you could filter the water but it’s not worth pinching pennies when there is so much on the line.
im curious. if you buy a 1000L water pallet. put it outside out of the sun. put a small pump on it like you use in your pc. you could use that loop with no problem i would say. the mass will not warm up but you will have an almost limitless supply of cold water
When comes to strange cooling solutions, i use MORA3 outside in summer, i move it inside for winter heating, in two locations. And my friend have a miner with 3x 1080 Ti watercooled, heating floor heating in winter. That is working great, Card are like 35 C max, producing like 1kW of heat.
if you have a swimming pool, I think it could be used to warm the pool by using the PC using the same method, rather than using the tap water since the volume of water is quite large it is slow to increase the average temperature of the pool.
@Roman, people have done simlar cooling buy runing water through a large metal tank such as a old propane tank buried in the garden ( any large metal tank would do). But either all aluminium or copper would to match your water blocks would keep galvanic corrosion at bay etc. I think Linus did a vid where he used an old large house radiator, huge capacity and took hours or a day to just warm up the water.
Using tap water is also very common in chemistry labs (if you want to reflux a liquid and not lose it you'll use a water cooled condenser), although for environmental reasons many labs now have closed water circuits. But sometimes you want to do reactions at lower temperatures, there are cryostats that can cool down to -70C and are connected via tubing. But I'm not sure if they could handle the heat output of a CPU, but would be interesting to try.
Hey der8aur!! There is for sure a very environmentally beneficial way to do this, but only if you live in certain cold places, such as canada, alaska, scandinavia, or somewhere like in the mountains like the alps. Which is rather than to use tap water, just run a large closed loop reserviour outside the building. And keep recirculating that same water back outside again. Then by the time it comes back through the loop it will have been cooled by the outside weather. Whatever the ambient condition is. This of course also works too for warmer countries, but only during the winter months. Finally there is a 3rd possible option which depends on local geology. Which only works if you have a nearby geological feature at a lower temperature - then pass the water underground. However the temperature can also be higher underground too. So that does not always work. Generally if the rocks in the earth have a time delay in them, that they still are cold from the previous wintertime months. Or if the rocks nearby have a water table or underground streams. To bring the temperature down. Finally if you live nearby to a coastline, or a lake. Or a stream. Then you can maybe pass your own enclosed water pipes through those other external water features. Or submerge there a heat exchanger. You then pump yourself your closed loop through. And get your colder water. How to power the pump? Well perhaps a water wheel? That can run off from the same stream. Not everybody has the possibility do these things. However perhaps a lot of people can do seaonal winter time cooling by taking their loops partways outside the building.
You can always heat some of the water that you need hotter than ambient and decrease the energy consumption that take to heat it.
The best use sounds like avoiding using a chiller a few days a year, otherwise I would be concerned about the life of the cooling block (clogging). I'd love to get some usable hot water this way, though.
Follow-up video pls: Take a giant reservoir (drum-size or similar) find at which amount of water you could use it without a radiator- perhaps calculate the wattage in relation to volume of the water.
The heated water could also feed into an IBC container for example, which you could then use to clean with, to flush the toilet or water plants.
Or just take a bath at the end of the day 😝
The 121 L/d is only in private houses. This does not include the water used to produce the stuff we buy. Something like meat has a very high fresh water use (not just rain water). A single burger is way more than the 121 L.
Run the water to your hot water tank. Double efficient. Save power heating hot water. You could also run the spent water through the ground to cool it off and recycle it.
Here tap water is at 6°C so yes it would be a cool solution to have an automatic charge discharge system that replace hot water with cold one when the reservoir temperature goes to hi. Or have an heater exchange.
I considered doing this at one point. Between the livestock and the garden, we go through more water than your estimate per day through the summer, just need a holding tank to even out the supply. Only catch is the water is incredibly "hard", calcium and iron. Would be pretty bad for the components I think. If we ever move to where the water is better though, it's certainly a consideration.
Haa! My landlord has 20m3 underground rain water storage, always cooled by surrounding earth. Only problem is that it does contains a little particulates of biomatter, so cleaning blocks would be a constant chore... also sometimes there is an outbreak of anaerobic growth that makes water smell bad. I would just pump the water back into the storage tank so no losses.
I've had this plan to zinc coat a few big steel tubes and just bury it in the garden... then recirculate clean water.
Water outlet could connect to your garden or outside tank for the garden then you would have almost zero waste. I really enjoyed this unusual episode and exploring the ideas.
Thinking about it a bit I would think there may be a more sustainable way to do this.
Long term calcification / gunking up of the microfins will be a major concern. However it may still be possible if you add a pump and a radiator, then cool the radiator with tapwater to achieve similar temperatures. It would make it a full custom water loop minus the fans, but it should not differ too much in temperature and would be less prone to gunk building up.
An other idea that would be safer than tap water running in a water block is to use a closed loop cooler that uses a small rad to exchange heat into the flow of tap water. Then have the heated up tap water feed a household hot water system, pre heating the water a bit and saving on hot water power usage.
What about an hybrid system?
So when doing heavy loads, you switch to tap water, when idling you switch back to a water loop. That way you basically only run for an hour or so. You don't need such low temperatures for 6 hours a day on average!
Or just put your radiator into a tub with the tap water. That way your components only contact distilled water. Whenever the water in the tub gets too warm the tap gets turned on to replace the warm water with cold water. Warm water gets used to flush the toilets etc.
The minimum flow for water cooling is said to be 1 l/min, so 60 l/hour. Tap water costs ~2.5 EUR per m³=1000 liters, so 0.25 cents per liter. That's 15 cents per hour in water. Let's say the PC uses 150 W on average (we're talking about a watercooled gaming PC after all, so more gaming, less idle), at 30 cents per kWh that means one hour costs ~5 cents in electricity. So with fixed flow tap water cooling the running costs are quadrupled or so.
tap water may be very corrosive due to the additives. it will be cool because ur starting with cooler water. but essentially, all u really need is for the water entering the water blocks to be as cold as possible.