custom loop cooling Custom house cooling loop

[Remington]

Linus, just watched your 3090 personal upgrade video. I had a thought: how about integrating the house plumbing with the home server cooling. 

I mean water-cooling EVERYTHING. My idea would likely reduce the need for water pumps and reservoirs. And you'd have a constant source of cold water. 

Two ways come to mind. 

The first is to incorporate the server radiators into a reservoir that the house plumbing flows through, before it goes to the water heater. 

The second would be to directly tie the house plumbing through all water cooled components. This would allow a constant cold water supply through your components and before again heading to the water heater.

 

Both would have the effect of heating the water a bit before needing to be heated. I expect it might help with the heating needs. 

 

These ideas could also be tied into the floor heater (or both). 

 

If you value my feedback, please reach out to me, I'd love to contribute

 

Edit: I know you tried in Langley and it was janky as balls but now you have the resources to do it right. And overdo it like you do

 

 

Edited December 9, 2021 by Remington

[BiotechBen]

3 minutes ago, Remington said:

Linus, just watched your 3090 personal upgrade video. I had a thought: how about integrating the house plumbing with the home server cooling. 

I mean water-cooling EVERYTHING. My idea would likely reduce the need for water pumps and reservoirs. And you'd have a constant source of cold water. 

Two ways come to mind. 

The first is to incorporate the server radiators into a reservoir that the house plumbing flows through, before it goes to the water heater. 

The second would be to directly tie the house plumbing through all water cooled components. This would allow a constant cold water supply through your components and before again heading to the water heater.

 

Both would have the effect of heating the water a bit before needing to be heated. I expect it might help with the heating needs. 

 

These ideas could also be tied into the floor heater (or both). 

 

If you value my feedback, please reach out to me, I'd love to contribute

Whole room water cooling was tried back at the Langley house. It was a nightmare. Not worth it. Unless you have a server/mining farm in a very cold place and don't want to pay to heat the room, or need high scalability, large scale water cooling is impractical and way more work than it's worth for the performance gains at a consumer level. Water cooling with a room scale radiator was also attempted, didn't go well. 

[Remington]

34 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

Whole room water cooling was tried back at the Langley house. It was a nightmare. Not worth it. Unless you have a server/mining farm in a very cold place and don't want to pay to heat the room, or need high scalability, large scale water cooling is impractical and way more work than it's worth for the performance gains at a consumer level. Water cooling with a room scale radiator was also attempted, didn't go well. 

Right but the difference now is about $15M. So he's got the resources now to do it right

[BiotechBen]

36 minutes ago, Remington said:

Right but the difference now is about $15M. So he's got the resources now to do it right

For the benefit that it would perform for his system/rack, it would be negligible over the current setup, and the thermal mass of the water in the whole setup might be raised a degree or two so the benefit in heating the hydronic system wouldn't see a legitimate benefit. Whole office in water cooling with all the workstations if they were all rack-mounted machines in the server room might be something that would make sense, but the upfront cost of that is immense compared to the benefit it would provide. For large scale water cooling to make financial sense, you need heat sources to be in the tens of kW scale.

[Demonic Donut]

2 big initial problems.

 

First off, your computer component water blocks and all related tubing need to be rated for potable water. Good luck finding that certification.

 

Second you'd need constant flow. For your water heater setup, you would at least need a circ pump that would cycle water through the computer even if there was no one using hot water.

 

Then material/labor cost wise, its just not worth it. If you want to do large scale water cooling, you definitely can, but your ROI you'll get with energy savings is going to be years, if ever, practically speaking. To do it right you'd need plate and frame heat exchangers, pumps, tons of extra piping etc. All to gain a few degrees of temp going into your water heater.

 

If you are using the radiant heating system, you'll be heating up your computer components as most radiant floor systems are running at least 80-90 degree F water, in my experience, usually higher especially with low outdoor temps.

 

If you want to do something off the wall, look into remotely locating radiators or even doing a geothermal loop. 500 hundred feet or so of PEX in a trench or vertical hole would work quite well. I would like to do this in a few years, if and when we buy a new house