Water cooling through a fish tank?

[MeerkatManiac]

Hey there all, 

So I had the idea to do a thing. 

 

I have my budget gaming PC, but I plan on upgrading soon. I'm upgrading bit-by-bit for a lot of it, such as adding in an SSD one day and a couple weeks later upgrading my GPU. I recently decided I would move to a water cooling system instead of just a 212 Evo. I had a thought though. Instead of using a standard pump-through-radiator-loop setup that we are all familiar with, what if I went an entirely different direction. What if instead of using a traditional radiator at all, I used a different cooling method. One that might sound a little fishy at first, but I ask that you hear me out and give me your take on things before I move on and start floundering with this failure.

 

A fishtank.

 

The water in fishtanks for most fish should be around 26 degrees Celsius, which is significantly lower than the operating temperatures for a normal CPU. So what if I were to modify a fishtank and run a tube with coolant through the fishtank itself. This way I get a totally neat-o fishtank that doubles as a computer part. And some little buddies to cheer me on when I'm gaming. Obviously this will affect the temperature a bit, but if it does start to become something significant enough to cause harm to the fishes I will take measures to counteract or just remove fish form the tank altogether. Just to be clear, the water would be it's own closed loop that simply runs tubing through the tank itself. I'm thinking a hole on a couple ends with proper precautions taken to seal the edges of the holes around the tubing to ensure no leaks. It would be pure coolant/distilled water/proper cooling liquid, NOT fish water.

[saladcrack]

This would be awesome.  Like have the tubes run under the rocks in the bottom of the tanks and the fishes don't even have to know!  DO IT.

[Bananasplit_00]

you will have really poor cooling and probably worse then air cooling. if you have no radiators this will be bad seeing as the tubes wont transfer enough heat from the inside liquid to the outside

[The_Denks]

2 minutes ago, MeerkatManiac said:

-SNIP-

NONONONONONONO

 

Do you want to get fish inside your CPU block?

Becuase this is how you get fish inside your CPU block

 

(BTW ik you mean a seperate tube thru the tank, but all it takes is one small leak and BAM, fish in ya pc)

[Enderman]

That's basically two watercooling loops and a heat exchanger and there are several problems with this:

 

1) Computers produce hundreds of watts of heat which would kill the fish within minutes

 

2) a fish tank is just a big reservoir and even though it would slot down the rate at which your components heat up, the fish tank would rise in temperature until it is near boiling because fish tank coolers cannot handle hundreds of watts of heat

 

3) If you want to use a water chiller to cool a PC ther eis literally no point of having a fish tank, you can just use the water chiller directly on the PC. BTW a good 1000W water chiller will cost $500+ at least, usually a few thousands dollars.

[MeerkatManiac]

I disagree, I think there would be adequate cooling. Also, as far as fishes in the tubing go, I think with the proper precautions that wouldn't happen.

[SLAYR]

Please don't put fish in the watercooling loop, they will be sensitive to temperature changes and die. A foshtank just acting like a resovoir (without fish) would possibly eliminate the need for a radiator if it is big enough to dissipate the heat.

[Mira Yurizaki]

If you want to do this, test it without fish first and see how the environment works out. Otherwise you're just buying fish to send them to an early grave.

 

[pwn_intended]

2 minutes ago, MeerkatManiac said:

I disagree, I think there would be adequate cooling. Also, as far as fishes in the tubing go, I think with the proper precautions that wouldn't happen.

There would be zero cooling. There is nothing to dissipate the heat out of the water and the loop would just get hotter and hotter.

[MeerkatManiac]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

That's basically two watercooling loops and a heat exchanger and there are several problems with this:

 

1) Computers produce hundreds of watts of heat which would kill the fish within minutes

 

2) a fish tank is just a big reservoir and even though it would slot down the rate at which your components heat up, the fish tank would rise in temperature until it is near boiling because fish tank coolers cannot handle hundreds of watts of heat

 

3) If you want to use a water chiller to cool a PC there is literally no point of having a fish tank, you can just use the water chiller directly on the PC. BTW a good 1000W water chiller will cost $500+ at least, usually a few thousands dollars.

My CPU on average runs about 60 degrees Celsius. It is by no means excessive heat and far from needing anything like this to be practical. This is purely for flair and fun, not because I need some elaborate cooling system. I really want to get some data but I dont think it's gonna be anywhere near as bad as you're making it sound.

[tlink]

i would really advice against it. sure fishes could survive in it but its not healthy for them, and probably stresses them out quite a lot. 

[Enderman]

4 minutes ago, MeerkatManiac said:

I disagree, I think there would be adequate cooling. Also, as far as fishes in the tubing go, I think with the proper precautions that wouldn't happen.

Do you understand that "hundreds of watts of heat" is multiple thousand times the heat that a fish produces?

People have cooled PC with fish tank cooler before, they are called water chillers.

You need one with at least 500W cooling capacity, and as I said they cost over a grand.

They are made for fish tanks that contain hundreds or thousands of litres of water, that's why they are so powerful.

[MeerkatManiac]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

If you want to do this, test it without fish first and see how the environment works out. Otherwise you're just buying fish to send them to an early grave.

 

I would definitely run tests before just throwing some fish in there, don't worry about that. There is some data to collect but obviously I can't get it without having at least some things planned out first.

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, MeerkatManiac said:

My CPU on average runs about 60 degrees Celsius. It is by no means excessive heat and far from needing anything like this to be practical. This is purely for flair and fun, not because I need some elaborate cooling system. I really want to get some data but I dont think it's gonna be anywhere near as bad as you're making it sound.

Degrees celcius is not a measure of heat.

Heat is measured in watts.

[MeerkatManiac]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Do you understand that "hundreds of watts of heat" is multiple thousand times the heat that a fish produces?

People have cooled PC with fish tank cooler before, they are called water chillers.

You need one with at least 500W cooling capacity, and as I said they cost over a grand.

They are made for fish tanks that contain hundreds or thousands of litres of water, that's why they are so powerful.

Bro, calm down a little. I'm not saying I just bought some fish and am throwing them in a fire as we speak. Cool your jets. There's plenty of researching that can be done, and I don't necessarily think that what you're saying is gonna be the end-all in terms of this discussion.

[MeerkatManiac]

Also, Enderman, you do realize that if you leave a glass of hot water on the counter it won't stay hot right? There is going to be some cooling done on it with only the external force of air. Add in some other force and you can change the speed at which it cools significantly. There are definitely methods which can be used to adjust how effective this will be with minimal impact on potential fish in the habitat. Longer tubing = better cpu cooling = worse temperature impact on tank water. If I can find the best balance between those three, I think there's a fair shot at this.

[Enderman]

3 minutes ago, MeerkatManiac said:

Bro, calm down a little. I'm not saying I just bought some fish and am throwing them in a fire as we speak. Cool your jets. There's plenty of researching that can be done, and I don't necessarily think that what you're saying is gonna be the end-all in terms of this discussion.

You're not the first to think of this...

People have used water chillers to cool PCs. Just look on google.

You need a very powerful water chiller if you want to get temps significantly lower than regular liquid cooling.

They are also not cheap.

[MeerkatManiac]

I'm not looking to get temps significantly lower than regular liquid cooling. I'm totally fine with getting cooling that is on par with typical liquid cooling. I'm just looking to do something a little different that would be a fun little cool project.

[samcool55]

Umm just something to keep in mind...

 

Fish are VERY sensitive to temp changes, if you are planning to change the temp of the water from 24°C to 27°C (that's the range of temps where most fish are happy in) multiple times a day (or just once or twice) they will get stressed very quickly and die.

 

Also, i have a 100L-ish aquarium with a 100W heater, plenty to keep the water 27°C (we had it turned up a little bit too high and our fishes weren't exactly happy). I honestly don't want to know what temps it would reach when you dump even like 200W of heat into the water constantly for an hour.

 

My guess is that it would easily go over 30°C (water temp) and most fishes don't survive that.

[Enderman]

19 hours ago, MeerkatManiac said:

I'm not looking to get temps significantly lower than regular liquid cooling. I'm totally fine with getting cooling that is on par with typical liquid cooling. I'm just looking to do something a little different that would be a fun little cool project.

1) first figure out how many watts your fish tank chiller can handle, make sure it is at least the watts of your CPU and GPU combined.

 

2) natural convection draws more heat away the hotter the liquid gets. If you have a glass of water at 100C it will cool down really quickly because the delta T is really high. If you have a glass of water at 30C it will only cool down slowly.

 

3) you cannot do this directly into a fish tank, you need to hook up the water chiller directly to the liquid cooling system of the PC. If you start playing a game, your CPU increases almost instantly to 50 or 60C, so you will be pumping really hot water into the fish tank, which then needs to trigger the temperature monitoring from the water chiller, which then needs to turn on the water chiller to regulate the temperature and pump cold water. Part of the tank will be really cold while the other part of the tank will be really hot, and then the cold and hot will mix somewhere in the middle. The fish will be dead unless you have some very high-temperature-range fish that can survive cold and hot.

 

4) go look up some water chilled PC build logs on google or something, because it seems like you still have a lot to learn about heat transfer and water chilling.

[infamoustrey]

20 hours ago, Enderman said:

Degrees celcius is not a measure of heat.

Heat is measured in watts.

Heat is measured in Joules, Watts(joules per second) simply measure the rate at which heat is transferred. 

[Enderman]

4 minutes ago, infamoustrey said:

Heat is measured in Joules, Watts(joules per second) simply measure the rate at which heat is transferred. 

Yeah, I know watts = j/s.

Computer components produce heat at a constant rate so you measure in watts.

You can't say "this PC produces 5kj of heat!!!" lol

[infamoustrey]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Yeah, I know watts = j/s.

Computer components produce heat at a constant rate so you measure in watts.

You can't say "this PC produces 5kj of heat!!!" lol

But the rate at which computers generate heat is largely variable. And the larger the body of water the more the body will resist the change in temperature. With a large enough tank, simply daisy chaining a few cheap cpu heat exchangers will accomplish what OP wants to do.

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, infamoustrey said:

But the rate at which computers generate heat is largely variable. And the larger the body of water the more the body will resist the change in temperature. With a large enough tank, simply daisy chaining a few cheap cpu heat exchangers will accomplish what OP wants to do.

Idk if you've seen this irl, but you can have hot and cold water right next to eachother with a huge temperature difference.

Unless you put the water chiller output right beside the heat exchangers you will have a hot and cold part of the tank.

And at this point you might as well directly connect the heat exchanger to the water chiller.

 

Under load a PC will produce several hundred watts of heat. Multiple thousand times more heat than a fish produces.

That's why you NEED a water chiller with a capacity equal to or larger than the heat output from the PC otherwise the temperature in the tank increases until the water boils because the water chiller cannot keep up.

Yes the large body of water absorbs heat and the temperature will rise slowly, but unless you want to limit your gaming or other intensive PC use to 30 minutes every few hours you must have enough cooling capacity to keep the tank at a constant temperature.

[porina]

I've actually thought about this before myself. As other have commented, fish have a sweet spot temperature. Just dumping in heat from a PC is not going to regulate that temperature, unless the amount of heat from the PC is far lower than that needed by the tank that the regulation would be done by other heaters anyway. For those that don't keep fish, there's a rough rule of thumb for small to medium tanks of aiming for a heater of 1W per L or thereabouts. If you have a big enough tank (probably 1000L+), a few hundred W from a PC is not excessive. The optimisation will be that continuous output from the PC will not overheat the tank. Obviously this also depends on ambient. Aquarium heaters come with a built in thermostat. A PC wont.

 

So basically, it will be a ton of work with risk, for relatively little benefit. It might be an insane job to do to get some internet attention but not really practical or cost effective.

 

If you have a large outdoor pond, this idea might have more merit.