House Heater as reservoire and radiator?

Mario · Post by **Mario** » Thu Sep 16, 2004 11:23 pm

I have a normal house water heater at the wall behind the desk with the PC. I never use it because the room is always warm enough.
Would it be possible to use it as reservoire and radiator for WC the PC?
Surely I would need to adapt the pipes and probably a big pump.
I got the idea watching the Innovatek MAXI which looks like a small house heater. Mine is about 1m high and 1.5m wide.
Shouldn't it work in principle?

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Fri Sep 17, 2004 11:41 pm

for a reservoir, sure, radiator, definitely not, unless you use copper pipes for the in/out, and weld fins and stuff onto them.

remember water heaters are typically insulated.

unless you're doing something particularly weird and/or interesting (a huge bong, Reserator, phase change etc), or are using a submerged pump, think of a reservoir as more or less wasted space - just being pragmatic, obviously a lot of people prefer using one, but for almost everyone smaller = better either way.

edit: nevermind, i realized what you meant, at first i thought you meant like... the tanks people use to store hot water for showers.

those usually still aren't that great an idea, but depending on what the tubing is made from, what the pressure drop is like and how easily you can modify the fittings it might be worth a shot

jpsa · Post by **jpsa** » Sun Sep 19, 2004 4:58 pm

I was thinking about doing the same, those things have a really large surface area. Mine has 5 stacked plates with about 1x1meter.
But I've given up WC

Mario · Post by **Mario** » Sun Sep 19, 2004 10:20 pm

Thanks, this is encouraging...

My first problem would be how to calculate the size of the pump and how to check afterwards that the flow is correct.
And will I find a pump big enough and still silent? If the pump would not be silent than it is not worth to go the WC way as my current air setup is pretty quiet currently.

I am trying to go the WC way to achieve silence. Maybe a test I need to do to revert back as jpsa wrote?

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Mon Sep 20, 2004 5:25 pm

not sure exactly how you'd go about measuring the pressure drop on that heater without already owning a pump or some other equipment... the cheapest way i can think of would probably be to get some large (like 1" ID or better) clear hose, attach one end to the heater, put the other end way up in the air (might need 5-15 vertical feet) and see how high you have to fill the hose up to get water coming out the other end at a decent speed. only problem is you'd need to be standing up there pouring water back in while it's draining out.

never done this, just thought of it now, would be funny to see someone trying though.
inline pumps put most (but not all) of their heat into the water, so decoupling and insulating them to get rid of noise works fine. i'd think even a 40-50W pump (which is borderline insane for one PC, if it's not wasting any of that power) would be fine if you enclosed it, as long as it's not a magnetic-drive pump running in a vacuum or something.
try googling something like "water cool pump pq curve" without quotes if you're curious as to what different people are using for pumps... most setups will work fine anywhere between 1 and 10 liters/min so you don't really have to use anything specific.

Gooserider · Post by **Gooserider** » Tue Sep 21, 2004 9:40 pm

The big question is what sort of flow resistance your radiator offers, but I would be VERY surprised if it had significantly more than the commonly used heater cores. A hot water heating radiator is intended to flow fairly high volumes when used normally, which means it can't be that resistive.

Thus I would expect that you could use the same sorts of pumps you would have used on a 'normal' WC system. Perhaps go for a pump on the larger end of that scale because you will be having more hose than usual, but otherwise you shouldn't need anything excessive.

Gooserider