The ultimate in water-cooling your PC: use your swimming pool!

[thewayne]

http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ebuehl/pool_cooling/

And the ubiquitous Slashdot thread:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/06/1410219

Comments

[silveradept]

Some people have a lot of time on their hands. Although I have to admit, cooling by pool is a good way of harnessing the water...

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The one prob that I see with this system is: what happens to your servers if you have to drain the pool?

I was thinking on a business level. You'll usually not have a pool, so why not install a fountain in a courtyard? It could be tapped the same way, but you'd have the same problem as above if it had to be drained. Or for another theoretical problem, at midnight Friday night, some drunk crashes their car into your fountain, breaking the base, causing all the water to drain.

I guess you'd probably want to have flow switches so that if there were a blockage or loss of coolant in the external loop that you'd either start an emergency chiller to keep the internal loop going or simply do a shutdown before CPUs start popping.

Interesting theoretical problem to noodle doodle with.

[silveradept]

There's probably a pool of water that's being filtered or processed in some manner at any point. If it's sufficient to cool the computers for some time, then there's the backup - when intake drops out, the valves close and the water circulates on a closed loop. When things are back to normal, then the valves open up again and exchange.

[magic-rat.livejournal.com]

It's a neat idea, but the first thing I wondered about was how the inner workings would react with the chlorine. He admits in his article that the various components would react with chlorine but that there was no danger in the near future. However, if you're going to go to that much trouble to set it all up, I'd think you'd be using it for a lot longer than the near future (especially if used for a business).

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The Slashdot thread explored the safer concept of having sealed inner and outer loops with a heat exchanger so that the chlorinated water wouldn't pose a threat to the inner pipes or equipment. A lot more work, but much safer.

[ateji.livejournal.com]

Dang. It just scares me when something I see on the local friends'-of-the-bf forum shows up in a place like this. ;) Darn that ubiquitous Slashdot.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I've been a Slashdot junkie for over a decade. My membership number is in the 225xxx range, they now have them in the 17 millions now!

Yet there are many lower than mine....