Liquid cooling through home plumbing.

[throwastone]

has anyone liquid cooled there PC through a heat exchanger on there homes plumbing cold water supply?

By trade I am a licensed plumber. I have installed a few boiler heating systems..
so here's my idea. Building your liquid cooled rig as usual, from your PC you then have the supply and return lines tie into a heat exchanger, placed lower then the PC(or at least the reservoir) for fun lets call this the domestic side of your system.

From our heat exchanger's potable side(house side) we now tie in a cold feed from your homes plumbing to the heat exchanger supply. from there we run the return line to the hot water tank for extra green energy points.(preheat water going into your hot water tank)

The benefit with this system I would think is you wouldn't require a rad or a fan, theres enough L of water in your homes plumbing which gets refreshed everytime you use a fixture to keep your PC cool. I also don't believe you would require a recirculating pump on the house side as I feel the heat will dissipate in the volume of water and rise naturally. Has anyone ever tried this or anything similar? after I move I am seriously considering this idea for my next rig.

 

[13thmonkey]

you could dump the heat ex in a cistern? but the typical distances would be a problem.

 

[throwastone]

you mean place the heat exchanger in somthing like a sump pit? thats not a bad idea except for the possibility of contamination from the stagnent water to your potable water. depends how much you trust your joints to never leak i suppose. I don't see distances being the problem, I can place the heat exchanger anywhere( right behind the PC) and do the majority of the travelling via the potable water. The longer the distance just means more room and water for heat to dissipate

 

[13thmonkey]

I'm thinking coolant circuit to radiator, radiator dumped in a big old bucket of water that gets refreshed, a toilet cistern for instance, sump pit would work as well I suppose. If you have a leak the coolant level will drop slowly.

 

[13thmonkey]

might be a quicker and dirtier solution that you can test before you move.

 

[throwastone]

Why do you feel it needs a rad if hooked up to your water lines? I do like that idea because it keeps the system completely seperate from the potable water meaning no need for a heat exchanger but it also means I need to expand my pump size to travel the distance(im not sure how big a pump you can safetely use on water blocks or use the heat exchanger to avoid that issue. I still feel though my way would be cheaper/easier because that way you do not need the second pump, rad or fan. That idea about putting a mini rad in a toilet tank is pretty clever, however it would be a pain to make it pretty.



Heres a diagram of my idea, in this diagram i assume you have a built in resevoir/pump in the PC. This is where my idea may hit a snag though. the heated return water on the potable side of the heat exchanger should travel up the line due to heat naturally rising forcing cold water to replace it.. however I am not sure if this process would happen/work fast enough naturally to keep up with the heat my computer produces. This would mean I would have to add a small DC potable recirc pump to wire into my PC.. I don't think it would be easy to find.

 

[Ijack]

I would be concerned that the pressure of a household water supply would be too great for the couplings used in a liquid cooling system. Still, i guess that you, as a plumber, know better than I do. But it does sound to be a rather complicated solution to a problem that doesn't exist; and it would limit where you could locate the computer.

 

[throwastone]

the pressure of your water main weather supplied by pump or gravity(water towers) would be on the potable side of the heat exchanger though, which would be supplied by 3/4" pex lines for more volume. the domestic side(PC side) would be under the same pressure any other liquid setup would create. The heat exchanger seperates the two systems eliminating cross connections(contaminated water) as well as exchanging the heat.

The job isnt very complicated for me. the goal is to create a fanless setup(aside from the power supply) I own all the pex(plastic) crimpers and the fittings and pipe supplied by the job site extras 😉 the only expense is the heat exchanger, also doesnt limit my set up to badly i don't think.. i can run waterlines anywhere i need to, plastic pipe is a wonderfull thing. not including the PC watercooling set up, it would probably take me a 1-2 hours to set up... just need a liquid cooled PC. next build 😉 I just wanted to know if anyone has done this before and if it worked out for them. im no engineer.. someone has to have done this!

Edit: My biggest issue is finding cooling blocks here in Canada. Amazon and newegg.ca are useless in that regard.

 

[Ijack]

Well, let us know how you get on.

 

[throwastone]

Well, let us know how you get on.

I updated the diagram hopefully it's easier to understand what im trying to do.. also kinda looking for more opinions, I was actually kinda enthusiastic about the idea. Guess in order for me to try this out I need to get ahold of some water blocks. do any fellow Canadian users have any sites they prefer to use to order there water blocks,parts and materials?

 

[synphul]

The two main concerns I'd have would be water pressure (as others have stated) and longevity running household tap water through the system. Natural tap water (even if city supplied) is full of contaminates and minerals. That's part of the reason for using distilled/purified water in the cooling loop. On the up side at least the water would be constantly furnished with fresh and reduce chance of fungal build up in the cooling components like water blocks. Any hard water at all wouldn't be good for it. Also, depending how cold your house water is (mine's pretty cold right now in winter) condensation may become an issue with the chilled water (below ambient) once it enters your heated water block.

 

[throwastone]

Yea I am having problems blowing up that diagram to be more visible, but due to code and contamination concerns you can't have your plumbing run through your PC what I am doing instead is using a heat exchanger which essentially is a rad with two loops running next to each other to transfer heat from one loop to the next. this means that the potable side(house side) of the system wont be in actually contact with the PC loop, it will just transfer the heat from your PC loop to your houses cold water supply. Returning right above the hot water tank supply. Next time you use hot water you will have some preheated water going into your hot water tank. This also keeps the pressure on both loops seperate so while my house pressure is at 60PSI the PC loop would only be whatever the pump/resevoir water weight creates.

The condensation is a good point, its hard to know how much heat will be transfered through the heat exchange, i live in the country the ground water here is roughly 8 degrees?(not sure on that one) ill have to get a pump with variable speeds on the PC loop so i can slow the water accordingly if the water is to cold. I could also use glycol. I am really curious to see what temperature the water going into the hot water tank would be.

By the way I think I remember reading the water blocks are tested at 100 something PSI where your house supply is usually between 30-60 so if your joints are good enough, theoretically you could have house hold pressure in your PC loop... just would be pointless. More pressure doesn't mean more heat conductivity, at least not a noticeable amount.

 

[synphul]

Oh ok, if using an exchanger that would keep house water supply separate from a cooling loop then I could see it being a benefit. So long as you had a shutoff on the household water to the exchanger maybe? That way if your pc was off, you could fire it up, let the pc cooling loop get running on ambient coolant to start with, then once the cooling loop is warmed up turn on flow through the exchanger? It might help prevent condensation problems since you'd be cooling warmed coolant rather than heating frigid coolant - theoretically keeping temp differentials to a minimum to prevent the hottest component temps colliding with cooler than ambient coolant? Just speculating on all this since I've never attempted it.

 

[throwastone]

this hole topic is speculation, i am unable to find liquid cooling parts so for my current PC so ill keep it fan cooled but next next build say 2 years from now will be liquid cooled even if i have to order from the states.

to be honest unless someone was using the washmachine or flushing alot of toilets the temperature in your cold water supply is room temp, so it would be rare occasions it would be exposed to low temperature water, but I could always instead of putting the return line so far away at the hot water tank, I could tie it back in the top of the potable supply just above the heat exchanger with a T that way im looping some of the heated water with the fresh cold water. I am trying not to have to put a recirculating pump on the cold line on the potable side of the heat exchanger, I may have to it depends how quickly the water removes the heat. Providing this metheod works perfectly I would be able to remove the pc resevoir in favour of headers, take out the rad, rad fan. Kinda excited to test this theory out, someone in Ontario loan me there liquid cooled rig 😉



Here is a updated diagram, to get over the possibility of condensation i can take a 1/2 pipe off the return immediately above the heat exchanger and tie it back into the supply above the heat exchanger on that piece of pipe i would have to put a check valve to keep the flow going one way and a globe valve so i could throttle the volume depending how much heated water i want to put back through.

 

[synphul]

That's kind of interesting and goes to show the differences. I did a little searching on it because I know my cold tap water in the states is pretty cool. You mentioned close to room temp and you're in canada. Not really 'official' answers, but it seems canada's cold water is actually warmer than here in the u.s.

Someone suggested that below 25c (77f) is considered 'cold' in canada and it can't be any less than 18-20c.
In the u.s. for northern states even though it's run in ground below the frost line (for obvious reasons) the normal temps are 45-50f (7.2-10c) - and for me personally living in a rural area on well water, not municipal water, it runs cooler than that.

 

[throwastone]

When I say room temperature I mean the water temp goes up from sitting in your lines. say theres 50L of cold water in your cold water lines and pressure tank(you live in the country as you said) all that water is going to get up to room temperature eventually, pending where and how it's run. when you flush a toilet that only replaces 6l of water in your system, which wont technically be replaced untill your well pump kicks on around 30ibs so for majority of your water use(high water use fixtures excluded) the water you are using is close or just below room temperature. the actualy water coming up from the ground is like you said somewhere around 7- 10 degrees i believe. I would have to ask the geothermal guy next time I see him on site.

If you have a constant pressure system thats a little different, they only use a small little expansion tank and a variable speed well pump. You would be getting colder, fresher water sooner pending where the fixture is in relation to the tank.

 

[Motopsychojdn]

Well with erm well water on tap as it were heres my plan> pond pump with 2" insulated ducting\tubes (with filter on the intake tube) from the well to a 20L insulated reservoir in the house, the water should cycle through bringing the temp of the mass in there pretty cool, remember that the deeper you pump from the colder the water will be
now you can either run your Pc loop straight into and from that res using that water to directly cool your Cpu/Gpu then return it to the res,
or run a loop into that mass and have another res sitting in the mass so the wellwater cools the 20L resses temp and your Pc res is cooled by being in the cooler mass of water, this way you arent using outside water with minerals etc in which will block your blocks and pc pump up,
happy to work on either option but both have much more to be discussed and trialled to see what fits your situation, and I reckon being a plumber youll be able to bleed the loop alright hehe 🙂
Moto

 

[Motopsychojdn]

Oops, didnt notice it wasnt Op that has well water until after I reread the thread hehe, same difference different solutions, take a line from your potable into a large res as mentioned, then return it from wherever its being returned from (large res or direct from the Pc as you decide) to the domestic water line,
if I had the opportunity I'd have the craziest loop ever lol
another Member who'd be useful to have involved here is 4Ryan6 he is pretty up on subambient cooling and the pitfalls 🙂
Moto