OCforums has a thread going about increasing the performance of a reserator. http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=326603

Effectively, the idea is to shroud the reserator. A 120mm fan at the top exhausts the air that has been drawn up the shroud. With a slow fan, this might be a quiet way to increase performance. There is performance data from someone, but I think it's in French

the graphs are in french but even someone who doesn't understand frnch should get it.

that is a rather large difference.

Just a little bit of airflow does wonders for cooling.

Here's a gem that may be of interest:

attaching a tube from the water inlet (inside the reserator) to bring the warm water to the top does work a 3 ceclius miracle when nothing else has changed, and is not any more noisy

Hey if anybody comes out with a really nicely made, commercially available, "Fan-Cap/Shroud" for the Reserator I that fits 80, 92 or 120mm fans and sells it as a kit, they might make a bit of money on it! Or better yet, include the special tube to push hot inlet water to the top and make it a Reserator Enhancement Package!

Come to think of it, with how the thing must be cheap and all, maybe even a return on investment would highly unlikely. I am not sure there's enough Reserators being sold to make selling a cheap upgrade kit profitable...

-Ed

I stick my tower over the A/C vent (periodic super-cooling).

Thanks 1911user, I was wondering about attaching an internal tube in the reserator...

Hehe, that's pretty funny

That was actually the first thing I thought about when I read the SPCR review of the Reserator and saw what it looked like inside.

making the duct for the reserator wouldnt be very hard. just get some construction paper or thing aluminum and wrap it around the reserator and simply mount a fan ontop. this might take away some of the sleekness though. with the price of the reserator going down though you could always just run 2 reserators in a series and get lot better cooling potential.just think of how good of temps you would have with 2 reserators wth the shoud thing and a low noise fan

or you could just use a normal rad with a custom water cooling system.....

just a thought.

Did you just stick some tube inside the inlet or is there a trick to it?

I don't own a reserator, that was a quote from the thread at ocforums.com.
If you figure out specifics of how to attach the tubing, I'm sure others would like to know.

Has somebode tried to make a chimney for the reserator? The shape of the resorator should make it pretty ideal for creating a stack effect.

If you where to make a 2 m high chimney around the reserator, the airflow should more than double, according to my (sketchy) calculations. A chimney wold decrease natural convection, so I'm not sure what the real-world difference would be, but somebody should be able to find a few really thick paper tubes or something and tape them together to form an experimental chimney.

I plan on getting a Resorator with my next paycheck, so maybe I'll do some experimenting.

Just remember that the stock reserator pump only has a head pressure of 0.5M (about 18 inches). If you put a tube on the inlet pipe inside the reserator make sure it's less than a foot or you'll make that tiny pump work overtime to overcome the pressure.

Just a thought.

A chimney would not put more strain on the pump at all. A chimney works kind of like a heatpipe, but with air. The air that is warmed by the reserator has a higher temperature than the ambient room temperature (duh), which means it will have a higher volume and a lower density. Because of this, there is a (very weak) force that pushes the air upwards. If you put a tube or open ended box of some sort (a chimney) around the reserator, this will mean that as the warm air rises, it won't mix with the cooler air and keep accelerating upwards, sucking more hot air with it and increasing the airflow. As long as the air doesn't cool of, if will keep on accelerating in the chimney, meaning that a higher chimney will lead to more airflow. This effect is called the stack effect and has been discussed before on these forums. If my calculations are correct, for small temperature differences (much less than 293 K) the acceleration of the air is 0.003m/(s^2K). This could be enough to get a small draft out of a 2 m chimney, but we won't know until someone tries it.

Sorry, I was refering to the above post. The fact that the inlet and outlet pipe openings are only about an inch away from each other may allow the just heated water to reenter the system without the benefit of being cooled. Putting a short pipe INSIDE the reserator to separate the inlet/outlet openings is a fundamentally good idea. Too bad Zalman put such a low powered pump with a low head pressure inside.
That is what I was refering too.

As to a shroud over the OUTSIDE of the reserator, that should increase the velocity of the air passing over the vanes and get better cooling performance. Although, like you said, in theory. I'm inclined to think that the static cooling performance might actually be better as Zalman designed it. The reserator would have access to a greater volume of air than if you used a 'chimney'. We won't know until someone tries it out and compares.

still shouldn't make a difference, as long as the tube doesn't go above the actual water level - pretend the "inlet tube" is actually partitioning the Reserator in half, with the inlet on one side and outlet on the other, basically turning the reserator into a hose. you aren't actually pumping the water any higher, since it's being replaced by water coming from the same maximum height.

Straker: You are forgetting that hoses have internal resistance. Just keeping the water flowing throgh the hoses is not a neglectable part of the work a pump has to do in a WC system. I guess you could easily fit a really thick hose with minimal resistance inside the reserator if you could just find some way to fit it on the outlet.

If the hose is a straight line it wont make much of a difference as long as the ID of the tube is >= the hole in that cap.
Bends are what you have to worry about...

Roughly speaking, each foot of 1/2"-ish ID hose is equivalent to .1' of reduction in pump head. And each 90° elbow is equivalent to 2' of linear hose length in terns of resistance.