sous vide with water cooled pc

[Hebdomad]

So if your water cooled PC has coolant that runs at around 70 °C why not use that heat energy to cook dinner while you're at it!
Alright. So this was inspired by the computer pizza warmer. But it's going to take a little more work and some willingness to push the temps.
It's not unusual for PC temps to go above 55 °C and if you are boiling your water you're doing your sous vide wrong. It's definitely within the realms of possibility.

How to do this. Well first you need to vacuum seal your meat. Any sous vide guide should point you in the right direction.
The next is getting your cooking water reservoir going...  This should be placed higher than your PC case / test bench because air pressure.
Any large tupperware container should do. Insulation is very important. Aluminium foil should do for both sides and most importantly top.
Just try not to pick a container too big as keeping that amount of water warm might be an issue.

If a fan controller is on hand (example below), you can manually control and read the temperature.
http://www.lamptron.com/2013/06/25/lamptron-fc5-v3-the-best-just-got-better/

Obviously a radiator is still needed to stop the computer from cooking. (cook meat, not computers! that's the challenge).
Contamination from PC water cooling components should not be an issue as the meat is sealed in plastic.


Hopefully this idea is insane enough for a few videos...


- Heb
(mods, not sure if this topic belongs here or water cooling)

[littlepigboy5]

8 minutes ago, Hebdomad said:

So if your water cooled PC has coolant that runs at around 70 °C why not use that heat energy to cook dinner while you're at it!
Alright. So this was inspired by the computer pizza warmer. But it's going to take a little more work and some willingness to push the temps.
It's not unusual for PC temps to go above 55 °C and if you are boiling your water you're doing your Sous-vide wrong. It's definitely within the realms of possibility.

How to do this. Well first you need to vacuum seal your meat. Any suvide guide should point you in the right direction.
The next is getting your cooking water reservoir going...  This should be placed higher than your PC case / test bench because air pressure.
Any large tupperware container should do. Insulation is very important. Aluminium foil should do for both sides and most importantly top.
Just try not to pick a container too big as keeping that amount of water warm might be an issue.

If a fan controller is on hand (example below), you can manually control and read the temperature.
http://www.lamptron.com/2013/06/25/lamptron-fc5-v3-the-best-just-got-better/
 

Obviously a radiator is still needed to stop the computer from cooking. (cook meat, not computers! that's the challenge).
Contamination from PC water cooling components should not be an issue as the meat is sealed in plastic.


Hopefully this idea is insane enough for a few videos...


- Heb
(mods, not sure if this topic belongs here or water cooling)

sous vide*
love the idea, and it makes sense, if you just run ur fans at a low rpm and maybe just use 1 120mm radiator for a cpu and gpu, u could achieve 70-80 degree celcius temps, which would be ideal for sous vide and work fine for gaming.  

[Atmos]

Might not work too well. Computer temps fluctuate pretty heavily as you do stuff, and sous vide requires a constant, steady temperature. 

I suppose though if you wanted to run a stress-test for 5 hours to cook dinner, then go for it rofl.

[BrightCandle]

The problem is watercooling components are very much designed to be sub 50C and cooking is typically 50C+. Most components might get to 50C odd but the water doesn't, the water shouldn't really be above 35C in a system (ambient + 10C) although in hot climates that could be more like 40 or even 45.  You would have to specifically under cool (too few radiators) so that the water temperature rose that high, which would put the components a lot higher, maybe 75-80 C and then you would be potentially in the cooking range.

 

Sous vide however is all about precise temperatures for potentially up to 72 hours depending on what you are cooking so its going to be quite hard to get the temperature right. Plausible and possible but it will at a minimum damage the water tubing and the pump, neither of which is designed to be that hot.

[Hebdomad]

Well you could do some funky things with the cooling settings.
Like turn the fans off at idle. But this isn't a realistic solution for cooking dinner... or is it?

Just as a test to see if it's possible you'd just have the PC running a benchmark for 5 hours.
But a further test would be getting the machine to keep the water at a constant temperature no matter what it's doing.

BrightCandle does have a point though. I know there are recipes for fish that require a lower cooking temperature. Just maybe you could get away with that if things are too hot.