Purple Ice?

[lilfiend]

i just orderd some purple ice, its supposed to be like a watter wetter or something, will this really help my wc setup or should i just leave it for the car? also it wont affect my pt nuke or nothing right?

currently running distilled with pt nuke

 

[lilfiend]

no one? seriously? c'mon! someone must know if a water wetter is worth it!

 

[BillParrish]

OK,

First you must define in your own mind what "worth it" is.

As far as I recall over the years of reading ( I have never used the stuff myself), adding water wetter to a loop has almost no effect on temps and if someone did measure a temp drop I will bet it was within the error of the measuring device. In theory it should help a bit and in a perfect world and added in the proper amount it could not hurt.

It is not a perfect world. I have no idea how it would interact with the PT nuke and if the interaction, if any, would be fast or slow.

So thats the real "is it worth it?" question you need to ask yourself. Is it worth the pain of having to drain and clean your entire WC system for .5 Deg C ?

You could test outside the loop with water, PT nuke and the water wetter to see if mixing in the proportions you intend to use in the loop causes any issue but it would only be a mediocre test as the water would not be constantly churned by the pump and would remain at room temp but perhaps it would show if something horrible would happen immediately. /shrug.

Me, personally, its not worth it based on the idea that if the stuff made any real difference in performance every pre-bottled bottle of coolant on the planet would have big red letters on the label saying "Includes miracle water wetting agent for drastically lower temps". Some do. Most don't. I also personally do not think that laminar flow (which is what this stuff is supposed to promote) is necessarily a good thing in the loop. Turbulence, I believe, helps with heat dissipation in rads and heat pickup in blocks.

Now that I avoided giving my opinion for a couple of days I expect the water wetter proponents to suddenly appear , such is life. Again if added properly and if it does not react with the PT nuke, It cant hurt much and might help a little. Or you will have to take it all apart and clean everything. So only you can decide if it is "worth it".

Test it in a cleaned out spotless glass jar, all I would be worried about is determining the proper amount to use and if it would react badly with the PT nuke or harm any of the materials in the loop (unlikely but read the label carefully)

 

[lilfiend]

i have an extra submersible pump laying around, was going to make a velonti cooler but im on a cpu only loop still so its not worth the time and effort right now, also i thought that turbulence helped it in the rad but afik the linear flow would help in the cpu block but again im not 100% on that. i already bought the stuff so i might as well give it a go, i am also going to use it on my dads car so not all is lost if this does absolutely nothing for my temps
hope it does!

 

[bluehaze013]

It won't really do anything for your temps unless you are running conventional automotive coolant through your loop. Most of these products are developed to replace conventional coolant and that is where the temp decrease comes from. Pretty much anything you add to water will actually increase your temps.

 

[Spewn]

Pretty much anything you add to water will actually increase your temps.

Except replace "pretty much" with "absolutely".

Anything you add to water will decrease its capacity for carrying heat. The reason why Water Wetter/Purple Ice and other products exist is, as I understand it, two-fold.

Edit: Everything written here pretty much relates to the automotive sector, I don't think these additives are particularly beneficial beyond their corrosion prevention in a computer water-cooling loop.

The first reason is because in the after-market, aluminum radiators are popular but it's rare for the rest of your cooling system to be aluminum(aluminum heads, block, everything that touches the coolant etc). These products serve primarily to prevent galvanic corrosion.

The second reason is because in a car, your coolant can definitely get hot enough to boil. In addition to preventing corrosion, these products raise the boiling point of your coolant. They aren't, as far as I'm aware, meant for keeping the coolant from freezing and you don't add enough of them to do so anyway.

Why do they advertise better temps, and why do cars sometimes *see* better temps with them? Because when you use these additives you *don't* use a typical antifreeze and as a result you've got a higher proportion of water in your system. More water = better cooling capacity, until it boils, which these prevent(which is, afaik, why they sometimes advertise/achieve slightly lower temps than straight water in automotive applications).