killernoodle
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2002
- Messages
- 2,634
For those who dont program, Lucite is actually acrylic. Polycarbonate is lexan.
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Absolut Watercooling
- Thread starter KevC
- Start date
For those who dont program, Lucite is actually acrylic. Polycarbonate is lexan.
Originally posted by Elec
From what I understand, high purity isopropyl alcohol is expensive and hard to get. The vast majority is produced to supply chemistry and lab stockrooms. You could certainly go buy 750mL bottles of Everclear for around 18 bucks a pop, if you wanted to stay with the booze theme. You should get better evaporation, but I'm not sure how well ethanol holds heat as compared to water. I too would be concerned about flammability issues with a pure-alcohol setup. You're not going to have enough heat from the system to ignite anything but I'd sure as hell be nervous having someone smoking or candles or any open flame in the same room. Should be ok in a true closed system though. You'd solve the flora & fauna problem as nothing is likely to grow in pure alcohol. You might eventually have a problem with the alcohol drying out your tubes and hoses and making them brittle. And if you accidentally left the top askew and went to bed, you'd probably wake up hammered
Thanks for the tip. I'll have to remember that when I have a billion or so brain cells that are out of line. Bastards always thinking. Let's go sleep in the computer room with the lid off.
Hehe.
Matt.
Originally posted by egon_dude
thats very true- just to let you know i had experience with that. Tried cleaning excess spray paint off a laxan RC car bodyshell with nail polish remover- got rid of the paint really well but then the lexan became really cloudy and ate right trough in some parts- pretty much ruined a £25 bodyshell there, so i wouldnt risk it with your wc setup
I actually had a very similar experience when I thought pure acetone was the best thing since sliced bread. I was using it to clean aluminum, and some type of very hard plastic, and got myself an Aironet WAP about two years back. The WAP was dirty, and Acetone was doing such a good job on the aluminum and hard plastics, I thought, hell, why not see what it'll do on soft plastics? I learned the hard way what Acetone does to some materials, and try to use it less frequently.
That and it has the really cool ability to stay in your liver for an extented period of time.
Matt.
Grabbi,
So far I've had a hell of a time finding any kind of Ethanol that doesn't have any kind of nasty impurities that will kill my system. The best thing I can find as a substitute so far is a 50/50 mix of Distilled water and Ethanol. - Windshield washer fluid. Granted, it's not going to give me the evaporative cooling level that a 99.9% mix of Ethanol is, but with a 50/50 mix, I wouldn't have to worry about my lines drying out, and the whole flamability problem goes away. Any ideas on the thermal transfer rates of alchohol versus water, or how fast they evaporate at approximately 100 degrees farenheit? How about a mix of the two? It would be great if I had some hard numbers to go with this. I would love to have something like this improve the thermal transfer rate of the system. Especially when I can get it at $1.00 per gallon. The only thing that I've had to worry about with the windshield washer fluid is that not all of them use distilled water and Ethanol. Some use Isopropyl, some use Ethelyene Glycol ( Winter in the salt belt...), some don't even use distilled water. I just hunt around for what I'm looking for and buy five gallons of it.
Oh, and if for any reason I decide that my sexual prowess becomes unimportant, I'll see if I can get a shipment of Methaldehyde. I work with a couple of people that I think would be due for a dose of sterility, but I think there might be something illegal about that. I dunno.
Matt.
Little Grabbi
Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2003
- Messages
- 565
I have no numbers at the moment, but Alcohol has a lower specific thermal capacity than Water, so it heats up faster. Its boiling point is lower, so it will also evaporate faster at a given temperature. This should make colsed-circuit evaporative cooling very effective, but creates the problem of high temperatures in the system. On my alcohol-cooled righ I run 58° c load, with an Athlon XP 28ßß+. Granted, I did Alcohol-cooling to combat noise, so the two degrees warmer doesn't really matter. f you go for cool though, Try 50/50 Alcohol/Glycol. Toluol shouldd work fine too, although I have no idea what (if anything) it does to plastics.
I'll get some hard numbers from teh lab tomorrow.
I'll get some hard numbers from teh lab tomorrow.
[H]ard[H]ootch!
(would be locked by the mods in...oh...about ten seconds, maybe...)We could start it along with a petition to create a new [H] forum: Vintage [H]ardware!
Back on topic: I tried the highlighter stunt with a few empty bottles of Chopin vodka. Looks great, and is easy as hell to pull off. It took us a while, my dad and me, and a bunch of martinis, but we eventually got the bottle, cleaned it out, and followed the instructions. Put a UV light to it, and it lit up like one of those glowsticks. Bad ass! Then we went through the other empties we have lined up on the windowsill. My dad decided to keep it back at the house, along with all the other colors we tried....
Matt,
I see that your pump is outside of your case. Do you still use a pci relay switch to turn the pump on, and if so does the AC power feed into the relay switch and then another power wire feed back out to the pump. Just curious about how that is set up.
Thx, Agustin
I see that your pump is outside of your case. Do you still use a pci relay switch to turn the pump on, and if so does the AC power feed into the relay switch and then another power wire feed back out to the pump. Just curious about how that is set up.
Thx, Agustin
Originally posted by AggieMEEN
[H]ard[H]ootch!
We could start it along with a petition to create a new [H] forum: Vintage [H]ardware!
Back on topic: I tried the highlighter stunt with a few empty bottles of Chopin vodka. Looks great, and is easy as hell to pull off. It took us a while, my dad and me, and a bunch of martinis, but we eventually got the bottle, cleaned it out, and followed the instructions. Put a UV light to it, and it lit up like one of those glowsticks. Bad ass! Then we went through the other empties we have lined up on the windowsill. My dad decided to keep it back at the house, along with all the other colors we tried....
It is quite a neat trick and cheap too. For a couple bucks you can buy a pack of hi-liters with 4 or 5 colors. Two things to be aware of though. One is that they will tend to glow less brightly over time. I don't have any idea why that is, and I haven't ever seen any that totally stopped glowing, but after months or years, they will get darker and duller. Ok, number 2. Do not get this crap on anything. We had a bunch of them at my fraternity house. Somebody (drunk, go figure) picked one up and was dancing with it. Then he dropped it. On the hard floor with indoor/outdoor carpet. And the bottle broke. I believe it was a red or orange one, and it took a nearly unbelievable amount of washing, drying, and cleaning to get all the color out. So keep the color IN the bottle if you know what's good for you
Taking this into account, I'm really starting to think that a 50/50 mix would be the optimal. The evaporation of the water is of prime importance, but all that evaporation isn't really going to do anything for us if the solution is too hot to really be effective. My load temps are much lower than yours, even when I had this rig on my old Barton, my maxium load temperature was only about 42 degrees Celcius. I'm going to have to play with different levels of alchohol mixed with water and do some more calculations.
Also, in terms of the 50/50 Alchohol/Glycol mix, I don't think a level of Glycol that high will help. When I was working with water and Glycol, I found the point of diminishing returns for Glycol to be at about 12%. Any more than that and it would just not run as efficently. I wonder how a 88/12 mix of Alchohol and Glycol would run? Hmmm... I'm going to have to think about that one.
Matt.
Actually, I keep the pump on 24/7 regardless of whether the PC is on or not. I found that in the battle against algae in my system, this helped immensely. This was especially effective when I ran an 88/12 mix of water and Ethlyne Glycol in my system. This also helps to normalize the temps of the system very quickly after it is shut off. Typically, the solution runs about 10-15 degrees above ambient after the system has been on for a few days. If I power the system off for about a half an hour, it drops back down to ambient. I was never very trusting of PCI relays, which is why I don't use them. Also, in my system, I can always tell if I have a flow problem, because the pitch of the falling water will change.
Matt.
I dont know if you get them in the where you are, but in the UK we can get these things called "ink erasers" which are like a pen with a normal fineliner on one end, and a funny white tip on the other that will "erase" fountain pen ink. I noticed a while ago while i was bores at school that rubbing the white end over faded highlighter ink makes it bright again. Im not sure whats in the ink eraser thingys but it would probably make your glow bottles bright again. ill do some searching on google