Anybody who have tried this or have any thoughts about it? A water cooled pc where the heated water is then run through pipes in the floor to heat the floor/cool the water. Is this just plain stupid or an interesting idea? I guess it would need a lot of distilled water and algae-killer stuff

I was actually thinking about that at one point. But my bet (I didn't try it out, so I can't say anything from experience) is that the PC won't produce enough heat to heat the floor properly, and if you start adding heat to the coolant to heat the floor, you'll cook the innards of your PC because the water flowing through it will be pre-heated. Unless you go with an open loop, at which point you have to deal with mineral deposits. All in all, probably best to have two systems.

Semm

The way I see it, the main point is to cool down the PC without using a fan. As to the amount of heating of the floor, there is at least some heat that will make the floor less cold (at least if the PC is on 24/7). One idea could be to have a 3D render farm where the water is going out of one PC, does a few loops through the floor, enters the next PC and so on .

At the moment I'm just playing with the idea, and if I'll end up doing it, it will be a few years into the future (and at that point, maybe the PCs are allready silent and cold... or maybe not )

Starting from that point of view...You might check out that article where the guy ran copper pipe along his garage floor as the radiator, to get an idea how much pipe you'd need per PC, to make sure your floor is big enough! Another thing to remember is you may need a fairly hefty pump to move all the water, which probably won't be silent. If you want a passive water cooling setup, the Xice one seems to work, is available now, is (fairly) portable, and doesn't involve ripping up the floorboards But that takes all of the fun out of doing it yourself (which is why I'm not going to be buying one!).

Semm

I think this idea could be adjusted on a large scale to heat my driveway. I hate shovelling snow. How many folding PC's would it take to melt 6 inches of snow over 500 sq feet?

and maybe one hell of an overclock??

Enough that it'd be cheaper to move to southern California

Semm

Hmm, thats an interesting question. Considerably more interesting than my homework here... I'll get back to you on that asap.

Actually, there's too much fancy stuff to figure out. Heat loss in the other direction, density of the snow, temperature of the snow, how fast you want it to melt.... I need to get around to putting my comp back together so I'll let someone else figure it out.

Look at it from the other side, Zhentar. Pick an arbitrary number of folding nodes and a standard radiator area. Do it! Ignore your homework. MWuahahaha!

lol
surpose if it dont melt snow well
ull just haveto get tecs
:D:D

lmao it would be a great idea to heat bathroom tiles / driveways with computer heat.

especailly those prescotts premium space heater there.

Ok Miker, you asked for it:

To melt your 500 sq ft driveway in Akron, Ohio, using the following assumptions:

SnowMelt Area= 500 ft^2
Fluid Temperature= 113.00°F (45°C)
Temperature Drop= 15.00°F
Fluid Type= 100% Water

And assuming you've installed a fairly standard radiant tube system in your driveway consisting of:

Pipe Type: ½" Barrier PEXc
Total Pipe Length: 690 ft
Number of Circuits: 3
Circuit Length: 230.00 ft
Circuit Flow Rate: 1.40 gpm
Circuit Head Loss: 17.4853ft-water
Total Fluid Capacity: 6.72 gal

You'll need a total heat load of 31,200 btuh to melt your snow...


That works out to a mere 9144 Watts of heat....

If you estimate 200 watts per machine, you'll only need 46 PC's to produce enough heat to melt your driveway.


Happy folding.



(Finally, being an architect is starting to pay off in this damn forum!:wink: )

Y'know, Rusty...If you set up a farm of Pentium M blades (hp sells 'em, theoretically. With 1GHz procs. I can't get to the order page to satisfy my curiosity, but they run about 1.7k per, or 1.6 in 10-packs), you could probably get about 180 PCs for that wattage. That'd be some serious folding power.

Ohhh, the possibilities. This could be fun if I had more money than I knew what to do with.

Semm

Recently my fiancee's hot water heating element broke, so she had no hot water for a few days. I thought that since the tank has a hear exchanger (it heats the water in the tank indirectly from a warmer source) that's going unused, I could w/c a PC and have it heat the water. Then I realised that if you didn't use the hot water, it would get to be just as hot as the PC w/c and therefore the PC would overheat!

Using a PC for heating as well as computation is great for the winter, but cr@p for summer, as it's usually warm enough as is (he says, as an Englishman who experienced the warmest English summer on record earlier this year)

If you use in the summer, your driveway will heat up a lot, so will you water do...
And temperatures on the ground are always warmer then mid-air temperatures.

@CoolGave: shouldn't it be Fawlty towers instead of faulty??

semm, have you seen my watercooling article? It is called "double passive radiator" in the cooling section. You do not need a football field of pipe and a huge pump to cool a computer.

Amazing. I thought it would be more. You know, that was intended as a rhetorical question.

Now all I need is a bunch of metal tubing, a jackhammer, some quickset concrete, an industrial size pump, a team of migrant workers, and $23,000 to buy the PC's.

Yep, I did. Good job, by the way. Gave me lots of ideas! And I know that you don't need much to cool a computer: I read another semi-passive cooling article where the guy cooled his CPU just fine with 6 runs of copper pipe the depth of his case (bolted onto the outside of it, I believe). My comment was regarding the plan to put the cooling system under the floor and use it to heat the floor, too. If you're running enough coolant and pipe to act as a floor heater, you'll need a fairly serious pump just from the pipe friction and bend losses, depending on the flow rate you want and the pipe size. Not to mind needing some fairly serious heat output to act as a decent heater My comment was mostly that it'll be good at cooling the PC and a poor heater, or vice versa.

Semm

PS...I still like the idea of a 200-odd computer folding farm acting as a heater at the same time. For some reason the idea amuses me

I understand now.

A run of the mill computer is consuming about 150 watts, a little more than 2 light bulbs. That would be a very cold floor.

What ideas did you get from my project?

is floor heating effecient
i cant remmber if its better than wall mounted ones
friggin cold in the uk now :\

Actually what you need to have is two separate loops of pipe buried in the ground: One shallow, to melt snow in the winter, and one buried deep, to make use of geothermal cooling in the summer. (check out BladeRunner's site for geothermal computer cooling in action )

Miker, some days I have lots of time to kill at work. (and free software to mess with)

Radiant Heating is very efficient, at least when done properly. And the best part is....it's silent! It doesn't work well for cooling however, so you tend to see it used mainly in places where the heating load is much higher than the cooling load. Most buidings that use radiant heat also have a forced air system for the air conditioner/ ventilator.

Herosformula: I've been kicking around semi-passive WCing designs in my head for the past few weeks, your design was kind of what I was thinking of, and gave me a reference point, plus a fallback if I get frustrated in my efforts. I.e. if I start wanting to throw the whole damned thing out the window, I'll just pop down to the auto parts store and use the two oil rads instead of making my own Down to the pump my idea is very similar. Now I just need to collect the pieces and get back "home" to California, where I can annoy someone at a machine shop.
Edit: And I almost forgot about the plenum chambers on the radiators. My design calls for parallel radiators, too, and it had never occurred to me to use one. The top could even do double-duty as a reservoir, which would save me a lot of work!

Re: radiant heating
Not only is it very efficient (again, when done properly), there is also nothing to compare with waking up on a chilly morning, getting out of bed...And having the floor be WARM. That's worth it all, if you ask me I wish I had it in this apartment. I'm limited to finding the spots where the pipes to the radiators are run, and standing on top of those like a gymnast on a balance beam!

Semm

If you get really desperate, all of the machined parts for my rig are available for sale from my machinst.

The first couple of iterations of my plenum chambers, I had the fill and drain ports located on the outside, but then I noticed that my case had about 1" of room on the inside of the cover, so I moved eveything inside to make the outside look better. I do not use a reservior, the bubbler tube takes care of any level changes. Also, by using two radiators, the water speed is decreased (but not below a Reynold's number of about 8000) to improve heat disipation out of the water.

Erm...I feel like I'm highjacking the thread, but it's interesting. I was thinking of making an external housing, actually, so there will be room in it for all the watercooling guts. No waterblocks, obviously, but the pump, radiator(s), any reservoirs or plenum chambers I decide to use, etc. Probably aluminum box-ish. It'd be either plain aluminum, anodized black or, if I feel like spending the money, gold-plated (I will have access to the equipment) :) I was planning on having 3 120mm fans in it, which would trigger if the coolant and/or component temperatures rise beyond a certain point, and ramp up as needed. I don't expect they'll ever be on, but it's a nice security feature.

That aside...Where's your machinist?

Semm

It appears that you are looking into many of the same things that I am. For record heatwave summer temperatures, because of the external mounted radiators, I have the option of placing a common room fan blowing onto the radiators.

My machinst is Jim at Livewire Prototyping http://www.livewireprototyping.com He is great to work with.

Thanks, I'll give him a yell when I get stuck

Semm

Somebody is trying the idea of running copper pipe through the floor to cool their PC. Here is their posting/thread.

Concrete Slab water cooler loop
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showt ... p?t=800958