Fish?

[heimdali]

I just was having a hard time not to ask if there's fish in it when looking at a picture of a water cooled computer.  But I don't want to be that mean.

 

So are there people who are heating their aquariums with their computers?  Has anyone built something like that and has pictures of it?  If you do have an aquarium that needs to be heated, that would seem like a much better use of electricity than just blowing it off into the air as heat.

 

[Heats with Nvidia]

It can be done, but you shouldn`t let the water flow directly through the cooler of the computer, because the water in the fishtank contains a lot of biomatter which will clog the fins of the heatsinks. An indirect system where a heat exchanger sits in the water of the fish tank should work.

 

Also the computer isn`t a very well controllable heat source, so your fishtank will need to be very big to absorb all the heat without turning it into a giant fish soup.

[JogerJ]

Fish don't like sudden changes of temperature. It's just never going to work without an over-engineered solution to regulate the temperature constantly.

[heimdali]

Hm, putting the radiator into the aquarium is an idea I didn't even think of.  I'd consider a plated heat exchanger, and I guess it might need to be connected after whatever filter the quarium is using.

 

I'd be more worried about what happens when the computer is turned off than about overheating the fish.  Perhaps it would require a solution that would automatically switch over to air cooling before the fish is being overheated and that keeps the default aquarium heater which automatically turns on when the fish is about to freeze.

 

[heimdali]

8 minutes ago, JogerJ said:

Fish don't like sudden changes of temperature. It's just never going to work without an over-engineered solution to regulate the temperature constantly.

Oh.  I didn't know that fish is so sensitive.  Don't they swim in different layers of water all the time with different temperatures?

 

[porina]

5 minutes ago, heimdali said:

Oh.  I didn't know that fish is so sensitive.  Don't they swim in different layers of water all the time with different temperatures?

That might apply to large bodies of water but you're not going to have a significant thermal gradient in a tank.

 

When running a large tank, it is common to run multiple small heaters. The idea being if a single one fails, it is less likely to cause things to go bad. They have individual thermostats so a single one sticking on or off can be detected and corrected. With a PC heating solution, you could do similar. Let the PC provide the baseline heating, and conventional heaters to further regulate. The thing is, you're going to need a very large tank to need much heating power, and depending on your weather it may not even be needed at all in summer.

[heimdali]

2 hours ago, porina said:

That might apply to large bodies of water but you're not going to have a significant thermal gradient in a tank.

Fish probably didn't evolve in tanks.  Aren't they used to some temperature changes they would encounter while swimming through different layers of water?

2 hours ago, porina said:

When running a large tank, it is common to run multiple small heaters. The idea being if a single one fails, it is less likely to cause things to go bad. They have individual thermostats so a single one sticking on or off can be detected and corrected. With a PC heating solution, you could do similar. Let the PC provide the baseline heating, and conventional heaters to further regulate. The thing is, you're going to need a very large tank to need much heating power, and depending on your weather it may not even be needed at all in summer.

The system would have to have a valve to switch between the plated heat exchanger and a radiator.  It would have to have temperature changes for the thermostats to work, and how reliable would it be ...  Sounds like a lot of work and difficult to get right.

 

[OhioYJ]

4 hours ago, heimdali said:

Oh.  I didn't know that fish is so sensitive.  Don't they swim in different layers of water all the time with different temperatures?

Some fish are more hardy than others, but you'll find most people that keep aquariums spend quite a bit of money in them. The heaters are usually controlled within a couple degrees, and then it's normal to have pumps to circulate the water. This helps keep things cleaner, water temperature consistent, water aerated, etc. It's not just throw fish in a tank, and hope they live. Fish tanks are one of those things that you start out with some thing simple and before you know it, you've sank a ton of money into one.

[andrewmp6]

You could find one of these cases

 

[heimdali]

On 11/4/2022 at 5:12 PM, OhioYJ said:

Some fish are more hardy than others, but you'll find most people that keep aquariums spend quite a bit of money in them. The heaters are usually controlled within a couple degrees, and then it's normal to have pumps to circulate the water. This helps keep things cleaner, water temperature consistent, water aerated, etc. It's not just throw fish in a tank, and hope they live. Fish tanks are one of those things that you start out with some thing simple and before you know it, you've sank a ton of money into one.

You mean they're just like computers?

[heimdali]

10 minutes ago, andrewmp6 said:

You could find one of these cases

 

Nice   At least it won't make the fish suffer, but it won't do much twowards cooling ...

[Mark Kaine]

On 11/4/2022 at 12:16 PM, heimdali said:

Oh.  I didn't know that fish is so sensitive.  Don't they swim in different layers of water all the time with different temperatures?

 

nope, typically especially smaller fish will have certain depths and temps where they mostly live. and temperature changes in that areas will be naturally pretty slow and not too extreme. 

 

 

Even bigger "fish" will prefer certain depth and temp but are probably less sensitive to it since they have bigger bodies etc. 

 

ps: plus,  fish can easily move when the temp gets to high or low, just a few meters can make a big difference.  can't really do that in a tank... 

[heimdali]

Cool, I never expected that I would learn so much about fish from a computer forum