How much maintenance does custom loop take?

[Ergroilnin]

Hiya,

 

I just want to ask out of curiosity, but I want to know what is about the average time of maintenance between each changing of liquid in the loop and also how much time does the actual maintenance take for you personally.

 

Right now I unfortunately do not have enough resources for building a proper custom loop (I could afford an AIO for CPU, but eh...) not to mention that my setup is not even worthwhile doing the loop for (i7-4770 non-K and 1060 6gb which probably does not have a water block even if i wanted to).

 

But since the whole setup is now getting old (still holding out perfectly fine for me right now though), in the future I will have to upgrade everything at once and once I'll have enough funds for completely new build that is worth spending the money to upgrade for me, cost of adding a custom loop would not be that major anymore and since I love the idea of watercooling for both aesthetics and better temps for either more quiet or better OC'ing build, I want to have enough info to know about it.

 

Personally (I know this probably may not make sense, but it is something I think of it) cooling just CPU with the loop seems like a waste so I would want to cool both the CPU and GPU (one card) in one loop. 

 

I know that adding a drainage point in the lowest point of the loop makes it much more comfortable to do the maintenance but I do not actually know about the time it takes with or without.

 

Obviously it is a very variable depending on used coolant but I wouldn't want anything too fancy. Other than adding anti-corrosives and maybe a basic red dye I would want the easiest to deal with coolant.

 

Other thing I do not know and I am 50/50 on is about going hard line or soft tubing. I wouldn't mind spending spending more money on hard tubing but I am not decided yet on what looks more pleasing to me and I guess that hard line tubes with all the fittings add more points of failure not to mention points where the coolant over time could start clogging so I guess it is also in need of more frequent maintenances right?

 

What do you personally prefer?

 

Thanks for the answers! And sorry if my English is bad at times or lacking in vocabulary, it is not my first language.

[RollinLower]

i've been watercooling my builds for a while now, and i keep going for more hardware in a smaller chassis each time. so this definitely negatively impacts maintenence time.

 

right now i take my entire loop apart every 6 months to give it a deep clean, tough this is 100% overkill. if you want to, and you use a proper loop with proper cooling and no mixed metals, you could run a loop for years on end without cleaning it once.

 

i would say that even when i take my entire rig apart, cleaning the loop would still take about 1.5 hours total. tough i need to add 1 more hour for disassembly and assembly of the system itself.

 

all in all i would say that a more common loop in say a ATX chassis could be cleaned in about 20 minutes.

 

my rig:

Spoiler

 

[Dschijn]

A loop with clean components, clear fluid and tubing like EK ZMT can run for years.

[For Science!]

In my opinion, its all about preventative maintenance. You do a regular maintenance to avoid actually having to deal with a problem, spending a day making sure everything is okay in a scheduled manner is far better than the system abruptly failing and you having to spend a day you should be doing something else.

 

I do annual maintenances on my systems, to give a little scrub here and there and put in fresh coolant. I actually this week just did the maintenance on my office workstation. The whole process took about 9 hours and I did it in one sitting (6pm - 3 am).

 

It's important to note that I didn't find anything "wrong" with the loop, so I could have probably not done the maintenance for another few years, but doing it makes sure that any chance of anything going wrong is minimized.

 

- Drain previous liquid

- remove all components from chassis

- Dissassemble all blocks for cleaning

- Upgrade CPU

- Bend new tubes for monoblock

- Refill, and leak test.

- Re-cable manage

 

After maintenance

 

Before Maintenance

[W-L]

4 hours ago, Ergroilnin said:

-SNIP-

I personally set aside a day of time approx 8-12hours atleast to take apart the loop to clean everything from the blocks to the rads adn repalce the soft tubing every 12months since I run pastel fluids. in most cases if there is no gunking or build up you can just cycle through the fluid in the loop and put in fresh stuff. 

 

With certain material choices as said you can have very low maintenance loops using transparent or ideally clear fluids and hardline tubing as clear soft tube can leech into the fluid as it ages.