Cooling a computer with a mini fridge

[John Jamie Rocca]

Hey forums
I got a purely hypothetical question for everyone.
Could i possibly use an old mini fridge as a way of keeping my desktop cool? Basically if i could find a way to get the wires out of the fridge with the tower still inside, and insulate the inside so as not to damage the tower with moisture, would that be possible to keep the tower cool in lieu of spending alot of money on liquid cooling?

 

[John Jamie Rocca]

Hey forums
I got a purely hypothetical question for everyone.
Could i possibly use an old mini fridge as a way of keeping my desktop cool? Basically if i could find a way to get the wires out of the fridge with the tower still inside, and insulate the inside so as not to damage the tower with moisture, would that be possible to keep the tower cool in lieu of spending alot of money on liquid cooling?

Yes friend, you could in my opinion. But you will have to take care of some things first.

As many friends in this thread correctly quote, the setup you are proposing will not work because of condensation of air inside your pc case\components. So, first things first, you will have to place the tower of your pc out of the fridge. So you avoid condensation and probable electric shocks, and\or destruction of crucial pc parts.

The first step in fridge-cooling a pc, is to place the pc case as is, outside the fridge.

You don't need the fridge as is, you just need its cold air,so you open two holes on your fridge (input to the fridge and output).
The output should go as lower as you can (cold air heavy,goes down). This goes to your pc case facing your CPU heatsink. The other hole (input) is free. The mistake here would be to connect it in your case also. The outside air is much cooler than your case air, so the fridge would have to take out a lot of heat. So,using outside air would be far better than the case exhaust.
As for the fridge cycle, I would make it faster actually and not constant. Constant coolant will burn the fridge motor but, starting cool,a 5min cycle could work just fine in providing cool air. Notice that you want the heatsink in room temperature and not lower, to avoid any condensation.
Also, you could fill your fridge with lots of bottles of water and let it cool it before you start your pc.. It will hopefully give you some more pc-cooling time due to water heat-cool capacity.

But note that a small motor of a small fridge will give you small cooling power.. Larger, better.. So I don't know if it is worth it.. I will try to do it as described above in the future,stay tuned ;D

Oh hey I didn't even know this discussion was still alive, yeah I didn't even think of doing that! yeah I came up with this idea after trying to use a mini ac fan (that didn't even work) to generate col air into my pc. As long as I'm able to generate that cold air any method is valid!

 

[Shawn Sanders]

You could also drill 2 small holes in the freezer wall for inlet and outlet, then out a couple gallon container of antifreeze in the freezer. put a copper tubing or rubber tubing in the inlet hole of the freezer and into the antifreeze. than put another tubing threw the outlet hole of the freezer into the antifreeze for return line. in the container put a pump. coil the lines up in the antifreeze as well this will give more cooling time. out side the freezer make sure you have plenty of tubing and coil it up on the top of your pc make sure you have plenty of air flow threw the top of the pc as well. build a box over the coiled up tubing with a fan blowing across it down into your pc. and wha la cooled air blowing into pc.