They told me I was stupid

[jakkuh_t]

 

[Quackers101]

at least not as clickbait as the other ones. nice.

[ToboRobot]

I'm just waiting to see who did the math on thermal efficiency. 

[Techrocket9]

Yeah, the idea is cool but I'm very worried about the lack of thermal calculations.

 

It's a brilliant idea in theory, but you'd want a mechanical engineer with a focus on heat transfer engineering to work out the amount of heat you'll be able to actually egress and ingress at every point and repeat those calculations for all possible weather and load conditions.

 

My gut instinct is that the losses are going to be so huge in transport that the servers see no meaningful cooling from the pool and the pool gets no meaningful heating from the servers, but I haven't done the math.

 

At a quick sanity check, how much power does a pool that size need to hold temperature? Will the servers consume anywhere close to that much power?

 

This endeavor reminds me of some of the projects I saw mechies doing in college, almost all of which ended up as "The real world deviates too much from our ideal model for this idea to be viable".

[Neroon]

7 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

I'm just waiting to see who did the math on thermal efficiency. 

I definitely want to see the follow up. I have no knowledge about this stuff, so seriously interested in if it will end up cooling the server room, while warming the pool. Would be super cool if it did this effectively.

[ToboRobot]

1 minute ago, Techrocket9 said:

Yeah, the idea is cool but I'm very worried about the lack of thermal calculations.

 

It's a brilliant idea in theory, but you'd want a mechanical engineer with a focus on heat transfer engineering to work out the amount of heat you'll be able to actually egress and ingress at every point and repeat those calculations for all possible weather and load conditions.

 

My gut instinct is that the losses are going to be so huge in transport that the servers see no meaningful cooling from the pool and the pool gets no meaningful heating from the servers, but I haven't done the math.

 

At a quick sanity check, how much power does a pool that size need to hold temperature? Will the servers consume anywhere close to that much power?

 

This endeavor reminds me of some of the projects I saw mechies doing in college, almost all of which ended up as "The real world deviates too much from our ideal model for this idea to be viable".

Yeah, I want a video with Dan to work out the math, and prove the "theory".  

 

[JogerJ]

How I understand the current plan is the very water that runs through the server is directly pumped to the pool/radiator before going back to the system. I didn't see the heat exchanger included in the plan.

 

I still think the server water loop should always remain separate. For ease of maintenance and less risk of leaks contaminating the water in the loop. Imagine having to empty like hundreds of feet of pipes just to change a water block or replace some part.

 

Actually no, it would be outright impractical or even impossible. Have you done the calculations on the distance the water needs to be carried? Water is heavy so you need higher pressure, but the high pressure might be too much for the server water loop (doubt PC water cooling solutions are designed with high pressure in mind). Or maybe I might be wrong and it'll be just fine, in any case proper calculations need to be made.

[Needfuldoer]

Whole House Pool Water Cooling finally makes a comeback!

[Quackers101]

5 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Whole Pool Water Cooling finally makes a comeback!

LTT pool gaming water, gfuel drink of linus's Whonnock 69

[src1983]

Can you guys do a video on getting Pool chemistry into home assistant (pH, orp and temp)?

 

I am reading about this now, but afraid I burn my house down

 

Thanks,

SC

[Nystemy]

Dumping heat into a pool is one way to keep the room cool. Personally I wouldn't include the PC cooling loops in the setup and just use radiators or one of those water cooled rack doors instead. Since it simplifies the system. But in general, using the in floor heating approach to heating a pool isn't particularly strange, and honestly one that I would take if I built a pool myself.

 

But keeping a pool of this size warm is likely going to need a good kW or two for every degree C above ambient. _{(this is dependent on the rate of evaporation, but the given pool is near the coast, so evaporation won't be too dramatic.)} A lot of setups I have seen used generally relies on using heat pumps for the job, since with a low thermal delta a heat pump can get rather efficient. And honestly, I would look into using a heat pump to increase the general efficiency of cooling the whole house by dumping the heat into the pool. Since most AC units tends to be air sourced and that tends to stifle their efficiency in keeping their warm side cool, water cooling the warm side is dramatically more efficient. _{(Ie, I would try to cool the whole house with the pool. A fair few pool heat pumps I have seen tends to provide a good couple of kW worth of cooling when used on much smaller pools than shown in the video.)}

[Bitter]

When he lamented the fluid to fluid exchanger being steel...I'm pretty sure it was stainless steel which ought to be just fine in a water cooling loop, nah? I mean even if it were plain steel, car engines run coolant in iron blocks with aluminum heads and copper/brass heater cores for 5+yrs at a time at temperatures and under conditions way worse than computer equipment and they're fine for 20+yrs if you change the coolant out every 5 years. There's even plastic components in cooling systems, pump impellers and whole thermostat housings or coolant pipes are made of glass fiber reinforced nylon.

 

@LinusTech I'm no thermal cooling PC server pool engineer but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express a couple times.

https://www.brazetek.com/brazed-plate-heat-exchangers

I'm fairly certain one of those would be compatible with PC water cooling loops being that they're stainless steel and copper and I assume you're running copper water blocks. I guess if you're really worried about the water blocks corroding you can do like Koolance used to do and just gold plate them, ultimate bling and ultimate durability. For the pool side I'm also fairly confident that stainless steel and copper braze would be probably OK as well long term. Can't hurt to give them a call and get some feedback. I know you're really set on dumping the heat to the pool but I'm not sure it'll be so great in the summer between solar gains on the pool water sitting in the sun and server heat and the long run and high pressures needed and the sheer weight of the water I think having separate loops is probably the best way to do it.

[Needfuldoer]

Kiddos: "Dad! The pool is cold!"

Linus: *Cranks up Prime95 and Furmark*

 

A heat pump water heater probably would've helped cool that room a lot, but it wouldn't be as entertaining.

[echos]

Sounds like they missed a big opportunity to leverage hybrid water heaters in the mechanical room. Hybrid water heaters are essentially electric water heaters with heat pumps. Which allows them to remove hot air from a space and replace it with cold air.

 

So essentially, the more hot air there is in the room. The more efficient a hybrid water heater becomes.

[AnonymousGuy]

I've been waiting for you...

 

 

I can probably give you the cheat codes for everything you're about to do wrong (for example had you submerged a radiator...it would have been bad.  Did it 10 years ago, don't recommend).  @Techrocket9is correct that you're going to have significant thermal loss just in the pipe transport.  It's not going to do anything for the pool temperature.  You're basically just making a geothermal loop with more steps by burying it in the pool. 

 

@Bitteris correct that stainless steel is perfectly fine as a stacked plate heat exchanger.  Do I know for a fact it would support chlorine?  No...but probably yes.  What do you think the internal parts of the pool pump n shit are made of?  Anyways since you're going to make a closed loop anyways, you should absolutely use these heat exchangers at the servers and have proper coolant on the other half flowing through water blocks.

 

(I'm not using pool water because this house won't support one, I use constantly flowing tap water)

 

Also relays and switches...buy the expensive stainless steel teflon ones. Don't buy the janky chinese ones because they will rust and stop working as solenoids.

[metzen]

Did you consider that the pool walls and floor would be too hot to touch?

[BuckGup]

 

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

I can probably give you the cheat codes for everything you're about to do wrong (for example had you submerged a radiator...it would have been bad.  Did it 10 years ago, don't recommend).  @Techrocket9is correct that you're going to have significant thermal loss just in the pipe transport.  It's not going to do anything for the pool temperature.  You're basically just making a geothermal loop with more steps by burying it in the pool. 

 

@Bitteris correct that stainless steel is perfectly fine as a stacked plate heat exchanger.  Do I know for a fact it would support chlorine?  No...but probably yes.  What do you think the internal parts of the pool pump n shit are made of?  Anyways since you're going to make a closed loop anyways, you should absolutely use these heat exchangers at the servers and have proper coolant on the other half flowing through water blocks.

 

(I'm not using pool water because this house won't support one, I use constantly flowing tap water)

 

Also relays and switches...buy the expensive stainless steel teflon ones. Don't buy the janky chinese ones because they will rust and stop working as solenoids.

Where does your water exit for your heat exchanger? Also what kind of performance metric do you get from a heat exchanger that sized?

[Quackers101]

when rather having pads/bag like in the pool to directly touch the water, instead of leaving maybe something that could break in solid difficult material?

where doing smaller batches than large ones?

[AnonymousGuy]

19 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

 

Where does your water exit for your heat exchanger? Also what kind of performance metric do you get from a heat exchanger that sized?

The heat exchanger is a 5/8" loop (based on EPDM garden hose which is a surprisingly cost effective way to go about it).  It uses distilled water with Mayhems additives (like the entire bottle of inhibitor + biocide).   Reservoir -> heat exchanger (with the servers) -> tap water heat exchanger -> radiator (so I can also air cool this when it's cost effective) -> radiator (to cool the air in the server room, because even with everything watercooled there's still heat being dumped in the air).  Total round trip length is about 125ft.

 

This is the tap water heat exchanger that's plumbed off a sink water feed.  The blue box is a solenoid so I can switch it off if I want:

 

 

40 plate heat exchangers of this dimension are something like 2000W heat dissipation at 1 degree C inlet vs. outlet delta T.  I don't remember the exact figures but effectively on any sane heat load it keeps the outlet temperature of the hot side locked to the temperature of the cold side.

 

The tap water flows at about 0.8gpm which is about optimal for this heat load.  

[Bitter]

Isn't running tapwater through the loop kind of wasteful? That would be about 20 gallons of water a day down the drain, 140 gallons in a week, etc. I could see the use for that to thermally connect a low pressure PC loop to a higher pressure much larger loop running say into the ground for a geo-thermal sink.

In my basement I have a radon gas extractor which is a fan that sucks air from beneath the foundation and exhausts it up into the sky away from the house and people, I've considered building a box to connect to the pipe that would let me put a water to air radiator in that stream of fairly cool air, it's about the same temperature as the ground which is around a steady 72-75F, I could then pipe this air upstairs to another radiator with a small fan and have a steady supply of either warm or cool air depending on the season. The reason I have not done this is because I don't know how much that would affect the slab vacuum from the fan and I don't want to have radon in the house again if the vacuum is too low, it's at about the ideal level right now where it's enough air moving to get the radon out but it's not excessive where I'm wasting power to do so.

[dogwitch]

5 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

Kiddos: "Dad! The pool is cold!"

Linus: *Cranks up Prime95 and Furmark*

 

A heat pump water heater probably would've helped cool that room a lot, but it wouldn't be as entertaining.

that nothing. try running double clac prime grid...

[AnonymousGuy]

5 hours ago, Bitter said:

Isn't running tapwater through the loop kind of wasteful? That would be about 20 gallons of water a day down the drain, 140 gallons in a week, etc. I could see the use for that to thermally connect a low pressure PC loop to a higher pressure much larger loop running say into the ground for a geo-thermal sink.

In my basement I have a radon gas extractor which is a fan that sucks air from beneath the foundation and exhausts it up into the sky away from the house and people, I've considered building a box to connect to the pipe that would let me put a water to air radiator in that stream of fairly cool air, it's about the same temperature as the ground which is around a steady 72-75F, I could then pipe this air upstairs to another radiator with a small fan and have a steady supply of either warm or cool air depending on the season. The reason I have not done this is because I don't know how much that would affect the slab vacuum from the fan and I don't want to have radon in the house again if the vacuum is too low, it's at about the ideal level right now where it's enough air moving to get the radon out but it's not excessive where I'm wasting power to do so.

Your math is off.  It's about 30k gallons a month total but It's cheaper than the HVAC cost of cooling.  Total for water (minus service fees and whatnot) is about $40 a month.  It doesn't really get wasted because my house is on a central sewer system where water gets recycled back for irrigation and wherever else reclaimed water goes.  If geothermal was viable I'd go with that...maybe at the next house.

[Bitter]

56 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Your math is off.  It's about 30k gallons a month total but It's cheaper than the HVAC cost of cooling.  Total for water (minus service fees and whatnot) is about $40 a month.  It doesn't really get wasted because my house is on a central sewer system where water gets recycled back for irrigation and wherever else reclaimed water goes.  If geothermal was viable I'd go with that...maybe at the next house.

Ha, I read that as .8gpH not gpM. That's insane.

[Required]

Are I am the only one who think flammable Gas is a stupid idea to keep next to a Server?

A small leak and Linus look like Dresden after the British when there.

[Lurick]

1 hour ago, Required said:

Are I am the only one who think flammable Gas is a stupid idea to keep next to a Server?

A small leak and Linus look like Dresden after the British when there.

Those are helium tanks....