Bleach (aka Sodium Hypochlorite) + Copper

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Gawd
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Oct 10, 2002
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So, looking at my watercooling loop the other day I noticed quite a bit of nasty nasty growth (bacterial).

As such, i'm taking everything apart (i'm adding a resevoir, have been wanting to change the tubing for a while now, and need to lap the block (im lazy :) )).

Would any harm come out of submersing my CPU waterblock (its a white-water 3 port block) in industrial strength bleach? I can't see sodium hypochlorite doing any harm to copper, but figured if anyone here has had experience with the use of concentrated bleach as a disinfectant, i'd rather know before I do something bad to my block :).

Thanks
 
yep turn everything copper colored to black in a day or two. Vinegar would be OK and rinse it well with distilled water. Dont forget the rad, its gonna be a pain.
\

After you do your cleaning:

Get a new plastic tub or bucket and soak everything in a pint of rubbing alcohol + 1/2 gal of distilled water and then rinse with distilled water before you reassemble. Do not submerge your pump, just pour some of the alcohol solution into the inlet and let it drain out.

Run only distilled water (my opinion the best) or fluid designed for WCing, di-ionized water or tap water is a no-no.

Do a "Google" on "Water cooling preparation" tons of info out there.

A teaspoon of alcohol in a gal of distilled water will keep anything from growing but if its clean before you put it together nothing should grow anyway, bugs have to come from somewhere. A teaspoon or two of antifreeze works too and you can of course buy coolant etc. etc.

Basically clean everything, then kill bugs with alcohol, rinse well, keep it clean and install promptly and don't spit on the hose ends to get them on the barbs. ;)
 
if your copper gets tarnished use a sodium bisulfate solution to clean it right off. More commonly used as a pool cleaning chemical available everywhere. You can use it cold or heat it up and it works awesome. It'll turn the copper a flat pinkish color that is easily polished away. It's a metalworkers trick. It should be able to take alomst any tarnich off, just don't let it sit for a day or two. A overnight stay should be fine. Make sure to take any iorn based metals out though, like screws, etc...
 
BillParrish said:
yep turn everything copper colored to black in a day or two. Vinegar would be OK and rinse it well with distilled water. Dont forget the rad, its gonna be a pain.
\

After you do your cleaning:

Get a new plastic tub or bucket and soak everything in a pint of rubbing alcohol + 1/2 gal of distilled water and then rinse with distilled water before you reassemble. Do not submerge your pump, just pour some of the alcohol solution into the inlet and let it drain out.

Run only distilled water (my opinion the best) or fluid designed for WCing, di-ionized water or tap water is a no-no.

Do a "Google" on "Water cooling preparation" tons of info out there.

A teaspoon of alcohol in a gal of distilled water will keep anything from growing but if its clean before you put it together nothing should grow anyway, bugs have to come from somewhere. A teaspoon or two of antifreeze works too and you can of course buy coolant etc. etc.

Basically clean everything, then kill bugs with alcohol, rinse well, keep it clean and install promptly and don't spit on the hose ends to get them on the barbs. ;)
Click to expand...

Haha, thanks for the advice.

I'm a little baffled myself as to why bugs grew, since I used HPLC grade water (its fucking expensive $500/L water that is ultra pure (I didn't pay for it =P)) and assembled everything in a laminar flow-through hood (like a fume-hood, except its explicit purpose is for culturing in an ultra sterile environment). I had a few drops of antifreeze in there too, so there must be some small 'leak' of air, or I just wasn't aseptic enough.

At any rate, yeah my rad is going to be a challenge as I cannot (under any circumstances whatsoever short of sawing my case in half) remove the rad from my case. I was just going to run my pump outlet to the rad, have a tube from the other rad barb run into a big bucket, and just continuously add alcohol/water to the pump inlet. Probably a stupid idea, but I could think of nothing better :p

I might just let alcohol/water sit in the rad overnight and then purge it with a few LITRES of water.
 
bigbadgreen said:
if your copper gets tarnished use a sodium bisulfate solution to clean it right off. More commonly used as a pool cleaning chemical available everywhere. You can use it cold or heat it up and it works awesome. It'll turn the copper a flat pinkish color that is easily polished away. It's a metalworkers trick. It should be able to take alomst any tarnich off, just don't let it sit for a day or two. A overnight stay should be fine. Make sure to take any iorn based metals out though, like screws, etc...
Click to expand...

Thanks bud, good tip to know.
 
lol do you work in a lab? I used to take tons of stuff from the lab back when I did research... gloves, chemicals, glassware etc. :) I never did take HPLC water tho.. too hard to carry since we ordered them in those big glass jugs. Best thing I took was a pen shaped like a pipetter. Wish I had more of those :)
 
haha i know the very pen yer talking about (its an eppendorf pippetor pen right? =P)

and yeah, since i'm the senior tech. in the lab I work at I can pretty much order whatever I want, whenever I want, and no one questions me as to why I ordered it. So i can basically take anything I want lol. I try not to take too much, I still respect my lab =P, theres just some things ya know, you can't just go on e-bay and buy, heh. The head researcher whose grant I order from is actually fascinated by my watercooling 'adventures' (he had NO idea what I was doing in our flow-through hood), so I don't think he minds :)

The thing that pisses me off is im an f ing biophysicist in structural biochemistry, and aseptic (clean) technique is pretty much paramount when I work with my bugs (I use the E. Coli strain BL-21(DE3) and DH5(alpha) to express the protein I study, and to express the plasmid DNA that codes for it). I never have any growth in the lab, such a thing would set me back days or weeks on my work, but a simple watercooling loop seems to have become the home to many microorganisms, baffled am I !
 
Posting from a lab :D

To combat the growth in my watercooling, I used Milli-Q ultra di-ionized (why is di-ionized water not acceptable for watercooling, as someone metioned above?) with a few drops of a special chemical solution that we use to keep our water baths clean. I'm sure you guys know what I'm talking about, or use something similar to stop growth in 37C water baths. 15 drops to a gallon of water.
 
Rezistor said:
(why is di-ionized water not acceptable for watercooling, as someone metioned above?)
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I thought the same thing. Less ions means a more consistent specific heat transfer and less likelyhood of static conductivity from the ions in the water. but what to lab folk know?:p
 
HPLC, also called LEPW Low endotoxin high purity; water is very pure, but if it sits anywhere it will grow bacteria. Actually, it is somewhat corrosive, because all the minerals and stuff have been taken out of it, it trys to leach those back if it stays in contact for something too long.
At work the HP water we use is filtered and then heated to greater than 80 degrees Celsius. Heating it and keeping it at that temp for a while will kill all any remaining bacteria. Everyone assumes that because it is HP water it wont grow anything, not true; we learned that in a very expensive way; it cost us over a million dollars to remove the mold that the HP wet surfaces grew. Everyone just assumed that because it was HP it wouldn't grow anything. Live and learn.
Add some very pure Isopropanol, at least 90 % pure; its rubbing alcohol; to your loop. I would do 1 part IPA; rubbing alcohol, to 20 parts HP water. you could probably even do 1 to 15 ratio.

Personally if I had the time and the equipment, IE a high heat glass wear, I would boil the water in a semi sealed glass unit and using a distillation column collect the steam from the boiling water. I would start off with distilled water, and further boil, evaporate, condense it to an even more pure form then after it was cooled add some rubbing alcohol, then immediately add it to the loop. The less oxygen and other organic components that enter your loop the better you will be. Plus I would run pure rubbing alcohol through all my tubing, through the pump and let some sit in the reservoir before I got it running. However the time and expense involved it doing this way makes it to prohibitive to the average user.
 
Originally Posted by Rezistor View Post
(why is di-ionized water not acceptable for watercooling, as someone metioned above?)

I thought the same thing. Less ions means a more consistent specific heat transfer and less likelyhood of static conductivity from the ions in the water. but what to lab folk know?
Click to expand...

The answer is because deionized water will try to get back the ions that were removed, so it is pretty corrosive, you probably would not want to drink it either same affect on your body.
 
Jarod888 said:
HPLC, also called LEPW Low endotoxin high purity; water is very pure, but if it sits anywhere it will grow bacteria. Actually, it is somewhat corrosive, because all the minerals and stuff have been taken out of it, it trys to leach those back if it stays in contact for something too long.
At work the HP water we use is filtered and then heated to greater than 80 degrees Celsius. Heating it and keeping it at that temp for a while will kill all any remaining bacteria. Everyone assumes that because it is HP water it wont grow anything, not true; we learned that in a very expensive way; it cost us over a million dollars to remove the mold that the HP wet surfaces grew. Everyone just assumed that because it was HP it wouldn't grow anything. Live and learn.
Add some very pure Isopropanol, at least 90 % pure; its rubbing alcohol; to your loop. I would do 1 part IPA; rubbing alcohol, to 20 parts HP water. you could probably even do 1 to 15 ratio.

Personally if I had the time and the equipment, IE a high heat glass wear, I would boil the water in a semi sealed glass unit and using a distillation column collect the steam from the boiling water. I would start off with distilled water, and further boil, evaporate, condense it to an even more pure form then after it was cooled add some rubbing alcohol, then immediately add it to the loop. The less oxygen and other organic components that enter your loop the better you will be. Plus I would run pure rubbing alcohol through all my tubing, through the pump and let some sit in the reservoir before I got it running. However the time and expense involved it doing this way makes it to prohibitive to the average user.
Click to expand...

Our FPLC, HPLC and all the reagents that go with them are housed in a cooled laminar flow hood. We have never (and hopefully wont ever) had any growth issues as access to the hood is limited to a select few, and the hood is sprayed down with EtOH and UV irridated after each use, but thanks for the suggestion. Fortunately we don't have millions of dollars worth of equipment in our lab lol.

Since i'm basically completely disassembling my wc loop, i'll just have to take more care with regards to aseptic technique, which is FRUSTRATING!!! (i'm usually pretty good with this sort of thing). I may add an RNAse and DNAse (not inhibitors) as well, any bacterial RNA/DNA won't last long before being chopped up :)

Yeah, i know of the waterbath additive you speak of, but I must say, whoever made it should DIE!!!! Its blue, and it stains ANYTHING that we put in the waterbath ... so we abandoned that idea and have now opted for the old fashion pour out the old water and refill the waterbath weekly :(.

Since I am basically completely disassembling my loop, i'll just have to try and take more care with regards to aseptic technique, but its FRUSTRATING!!! (i'm usually pretty good with this sort of thing *shrug*). I may add an RNAse and DNAse to the loop (not inhibitors), any bacterial RNA/DNA that's present in the loop shouldn't last long before being chopped up by RNAses/DNAses.

I'd never thought of PRE-cleaning the tubing with isopropanol (and yes I know its rubbing alcohol *grunt* ... aka 2-propoanol aka CH3CH(OH)CH3) =P), thanks for the suggestion, I will make certain to do this.

Any suggestions for my rad? Its permanently mounted in my case (and there is absolutely no way of removing it), the only two things I could think of was to just connect the pump in such a manner that the inlet is (temporarily) connected to a water faucet, and the outlet to the rad (and the other rad port to a bucket or some other form of water removal) or to fill the rad with dilute isopropanol and let it sit overnight, and then purge with a lot of water. Anyone know anything about CLR? I admitedly know nothing of this product, but the commercials look convincing =P, would this product damage my heatercore, or in the future my loop? Sorry, once again I don't know much about this product :).

Thanks :) :) :)
 
screw aseptic technique :) just get a bottle of Swiftech Hydrx and you won't have any problems... I put my loop together in my bathroom and I didn't have any growth for 6 months until I drained and put in fresh coolant. If you are worried about your radiator, flush it with DI water and fill it with vinegar for an hour, then repeat again (flush DI water and fill with vinegar for an hour) and then flush one more time with DI water.
 
Hahah, I didn't actually say litres :p , but I do DESPISE the Imperial system for its non-sensical idiocricy ... we live in a society that primarily uses a number system of BASE10 (I know there are exceptions ... in general though we speak of things using 10 numbers), so why on gods green earth would we use a system where TWELVE inches makes a foot, and THREE feet make a yard, I could not even begin to comprehend the difficulty in using such a system for molecular scale work :p

See, all I have to do is ... move the decimal, its a lot easier to make a working 10uM solution from a 10mM (10^-3th of the final volume) stock using the f ing decimal system then using random numbers that don't follow any sense of linearity or scalability with the mathematical system we use. It would prolly take me an hour just to figure out how much to add to make a simple solution.

DAMN YOU IMPERIAL SYSTEM, AND YOU PPL WHO FOLLOW IT AND THINK ITS A GOOD SYSTEM!!!

ahem, anyways, yes, indeed you cannot begin to comprehend how baffled I am at the growth of bacteria in my loop, I despise all bacteria that i'm not using myself to exploit for my own purposes :D :D :D

I do live in a, well, shithole ... tidiness at home doesn't actually exist.
 
Personally I would buy a few gallons of distilled water from the local grocery store and remove about 12 ounces of water, then add back 12 ounces of IPA, this is about a 10 to 1 water to IPA ratio. Shake it up real good and pour it in your rad, making sure that you allow the air to escape, ie having you drain open until there is good flow. Then close off your drain and fill it up. Let it soak for 24 hours or so, drain it off and flush it with 3-4 gallons of distilled water. Then set up your loop as soon as possible. I would remake a a new cooling, ie at least 2 gallons of solution; of 15 to 1 distilled water to IPA, you could probably even go as high as 20 to 1. Add it in and bleed the air from your system. The excess cooling solution can be stored in a warm place or poured down the sink, having the added benefit of killing any nasty sink bacteria.
 
The bacteria come from your water cooling gear. Remember it is usually tested with some kind of water or pressured gas. They probably don't spend a lot of time on aseptic or sterile techniques in developing their test facilities. Most likely it comes from either the pump or the radiator.

Suggest you don't use any kind of solvents (like isopropyl alcohol) if you have any plexiglas in your system as it will crack it.
 
I used to put a couple of drops of dishwashing liquid in my loop to prevent any bacteria or algae. Its also an excellent water wetter!
I say used to as I have no need for watercooling now. I'd do the same again though :)
 
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