laptop cooling using using cotton wads/balls and aluminium foil. is it a good idea?

[Jean Claude Jeffrey]

guys, am looking to cool my laptop using cotton soaked(cylindrically shaped cotton rolls) in water placed under my laptop. the underside of the laptop will have 2 layers of aluminium foil which can prevent water from getting to the laptop and also help conduct heat to the wet cotton. one worry here is that the foil will block vents on the underside, though i hope its not a problem if the cooling effect is good enough

the whole setup will be placed on a steel plate or something like that where i can go on adding water to the plate and the cotton will wick the water up. i dont know whether it will lead to condensation. but it should not since the water will be at room temperature all the time.

my question is: will it lead to condensation? are there any other problems it can lead to?
if this is a good way to cool, any ideas to improve it?

my goal is not overclocking. am not a gamer,nevertheless am a hardcore user

 

[McHenryB]

if this is a good way to cool, any ideas to improve it?

It sounds like a terrible idea.

 

[Jean Claude Jeffrey]

if this is a good way to cool, any ideas to improve it?

It sounds like a terrible idea.

is it due to condensation?
please note that the water is not touching the laptop in any way.

 

[McHenryB]

Apart from the messiness of the solution I don't believe it will help to cool the laptop at all. As you have said, it is more likely that the aluminium foil will block the vents and stop the cooling system from working properly. Also, the use of water in the vicinity of running electronic equipment (other than in a properly engineered cooling scheme) is asking for trouble.

If you are having problems with your laptop overheating (presumably you are monitoring the temperatures to determine this) use a properly engineered product (such as http://www.amazon.co.uk/Targus-AWE55EU-Laptop-Cooling-laptop/dp/B002Q8X3L2 ) rather than a Micky Mouse solution.

 

[das_stig]

Are you trolling or just escape from the loony bin ?

Go and get a laptop cooler and stop being a plank !

 

[Jean Claude Jeffrey]

Are you trolling or just escape from the loony bin ?

Go and get a laptop cooler and stop being a plank !

i already have a cooling pad- and a good one at that
but it probably is not as good at doing its job. the temp drop is 10 degrees C at best. and several other liquid cooling methods discussed here are too complicated for me. anyways i'll drop my (stupid) idea and think about getting a more powerful fan

 

[tech-wreck]

how often do you open it up and remove the dust?

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

I assume you have overheating problems

Is this only when playing games or all the time?

what is the room temperature?

how old is laptop ?
and when did you last blow dust & fluff out of the cooling van & vents ?

can you feel hot air being blown out of the vents and hear fan running ?


If you dont feel confident in opening the laptop case after looking at a few u-tube videos and reading the instructions pay a professional to do it for you.

regards

Mike Barnes

 

[Solandri]

If I'm reading this right, you're basically trying to put together an evaporative cooler (swamp cooler) . The idea being that heat will be transferred from the laptop's bottom, through two sheets of aluminum foil, along a steel plate, to a pool of water with cotton balls in it to accelerate the evaporation process. On a theoretical basis, yes the idea will work. I can see several problems with it though.

1) I doubt you'll get much heat transfer through the bottom of the laptop. Laptops are designed to vent heat into the air via the heatsink and fan. If you were to somehow replace this heatsink with water cooling and attach that radiator to your steel plate (or just dunk the radiator in your water), it would be a lot more effective. Just because the bottom of the laptop gets hot doesn't mean it's a good place to draw heat. Temperature is caused by the combination of heat generation and heat removal. If you have low heat removal (like the bottom of a laptop), even a low rate of heat generation will lead to high temperatures.

2) The layers of aluminum foil will severely degrade your heat transfer. The CPU's heat spreader and heat sink are not perfectly flat, so people use thermal paste to fill in any air gaps that form when you mate them. You're proposing putting two layers of aluminum foil on a steel plate, which creates three non-flat contact surfaces which will be full of microscopic air gaps. Thermal paste is a pretty lousy heat conductor, but air is much much worse so it's preferable to have the gaps filled with paste.

3) If you can get it to work, yes you'll have condensation. Any time you cool something below air temperature, you risk condensation. Assuming it worked, the evaporation would lower the water temperature below ambient air temperature. That in turn would cool the steel, which cools the aluminum foil. The foil being below ambient air temperature and having a large surface area would cause water in the air to condense onto it. How much depends on the temperature differential and the humidity of the air. So the foil wouldn't be very effective at keeping your laptop dry, since the more effective it is at cooling, the lower the temperature of the foil, and the greater the condensation from the ambient air.

4) This is a rather complex contraption. Probably overly complex. You can basically achieve the same thing by buying a swamp cooler and pumping its outflow air (which will typically be 5-20 degrees cooler than the ambient air, depending on relative humidity) into the intake vents on the laptop. The laptop's fans will then blow it over the heatsink, and the cooler air temp will cause a greater rate of heat transfer. The problem being that you're blowing humidified air into the laptop. The heat of the laptop should help prevent condensation and corrosion (heating up the air increases the amount of water vapor it can hold, thus increasing evaporation and reducing the risk of condensation - how a hair dryer works), But if there's any part of the laptop which for whatever reason is cooler than this humid air, then water will condense onto it.

The temperature reduction of the swamp cooler will also depend on the ambient air temperature and humidity. The higher the ambient humidity, the less effective the cooling. Swamp coolers are very effective in hot, dry air like in a desert. They're pretty useless when the humidity is high. Also, a few cotton balls in a pool of water isn't going to generate much cooling. You'll need at least a fan, preferably blowing through the cotton (rather than just over).

http://home.howstuffworks.com/home-improvement/heating-and-cooling/swamp-cooler.htm