Anyone used a Beer Cooler in their Loop?

rjkoneill said:
adding any form of waterchiller to a loop is all well and good. you need to ensure that the chiller will remove the heat output from the components and not get overstressed

adding a waterchiller to a loop with an existing radiator doesnt work
air actually warms up the coolant that passes through a radiator

this totally negates the point of chilling the water.
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Brilliant - thankyou.

blueacid said:
I suppose a fancy control circuit would be sensible; If the water temp is above ambient, fire up the radiator fans. If it's below ambient, don't do so for the reasons you've already outlined.

That projector looks an utter beast. Nice work on getting it! I suppose in line with people's fears about overloading the beer fridge, and also worries about condensation, would it be feasible to perhaps get the chiller's compressor to only activate if the loop temperature rises above (say) 40c? Then the compressor would cut in to help dissipate the heat load of gaming as well as the radiator, but if you're just browsing then you'd give the thing a break?
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I'm an automation/controls/systems engineer. Been thinking about diverter valves for a while now for the water but that doesn't help with the cool air. It's looking like I am going to need a custom chiller loop and to run the rad under refridgerant not glycol.

Thoughts at this point are:

1) Air conditioned table (where am I going to put a condenser?)
2) Seperate cool loop for the rest of the system.

Bigger project than I had envisidged :eek:
 
the question remains, why on earth do you want to waste all this time trying to do something to an already perfectly functioning watercooling setup? what exactly are you trying to attain from this? :confused:
 
why not just sort the watercooling loop so that the radiators can be in another room/cupboard that way you can have a silly amount of high power fans without the noise issues.
I'm sure i saw a 9 fan rad on a site the other day, a couple of them in another room with a decent pump and lots of fans and your sorted.
 
actually i think the rads would just act as fan coils and not put that much heat into the loop might even drop the ambient in my room if set low enough (work with ac, maintenance engineer)

rads are not going to add as much heat to the loop as my 470 sli's and i7 and the res in these chillers is about 2.5 gallons so in all think the rads will add very little to the overall heat of the loop

you guys should check out custom pcs review of the chiller they where getting some nice temps even with rads in the loop
 
From what I remember fridges and coolers try to keep something at a certain temperature and so will be constantly straining to lower the temperature of your case and will probably break the cooler.
 
Gashman said:
fridges don't work very well when heat is being emitted into them, im guessing that is your intention? to use the refrigerator to cool the air temperature around your radiator, well what else could you do. the point is, fridges (no matter what sort) aren't intended for use with items that actually generate thermal energy, they are meant to take items that have merely absorbed energy and cool them to a specified temperature, then once there keep them at that temperature. can't see how beer cooler could honestly benefit your setup to be honest, more likely to end in some sort of disaster. ;)
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i tried this age's ago with one of them mini fridges, it wasn't bad for a while then when i thought it was working well i decided to have a bit of a battle on call of duty 2 multiplayer....... let's just say bad move, i had steam coming out of the side of the case:eek:...... i wondered why the game stopped working:confused::D lol, i was using a thermaltake bigwater SE (iirc) with 2 6800gt's in sli with an overclocked x2 (again iirc) anyway what happened was the temps went up and one of the pipes kinked and the heat & pressure of the water burst the pipe spraying coolant everywhere so turned the power off and went to bed, got up the next day to inspect the carnage and to see if anything would work after all that and to my amazement after replacing the pipe and refilling the system i pressed the power button and praying it didn't explode it worked just go's to show using the right coolant is a must

anyway back to the fridge i thought about a few other ways of using it in the loop and after upgrading to the bigwater 850 i had a system using bigger tubing and larger fittings but with a change of fittings on my old bits ment i could use them in the loop as well so i had the large 240 rad cooling the cpu with the old 120 rad next in line then the 2 gpus then because i had an extra cpu block i come up with the idea of cutting the fridge up leaving just the base with the peltier and gubbins which i attached the 2nd cpu block to then back to the res, it worked quite well and helped me push a little more reaching 3.1 - 3.2 iirc so not bad but had a big problem with condensation round the peltier so much so after a couple of weeks i removed it from the system
 
rjkoneill said:
adding a waterchiller to a loop with an existing radiator doesnt work
air actually warms up the coolant that passes through a radiator

this totally negates the point of chilling the water.
Click to expand...

Surely you could if you put it in this order it would work fine:

Computer->Rad->Chiller->Computer

Some heat would be then taken out by the rad, the the chiller would do the rest? If it was set up like below then i'd agree with you:
Computer->Chiller->Rad->Computer
 
lukext said:
Surely you could if you put it in this order it would work fine:

Computer->Rad->Chiller->Computer

Some heat would be then taken out by the rad, the the chiller would do the rest? If it was set up like below then i'd agree with you:
Computer->Chiller->Rad->Computer
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This depend's if the loop gets above ambient temp.

It may be the case you have fans on standby ready if such a time is called for them to cut in.
 
rjkoneill said:
adding any form of waterchiller to a loop is all well and good. you need to ensure that the chiller will remove the heat output from the components and not get overstressed

adding a waterchiller to a loop with an existing radiator doesnt work
air actually warms up the coolant that passes through a radiator

this totally negates the point of chilling the water.
Click to expand...

This - I ran a pelt/chiller combination for ages on my old Opti 146. I too was tempted to add some Radiators to improve its capacity - but unfortunately, as pointed out above, if the loop is running below ambient then the rads are working against you. That said - there are a couple of things you can do if you are in it for the 'fun' ;)

I'd put the rads and the chiller in a parallel either/or sequence. Effectively the water either goes to the chiller or the rads, removing the issue of them fighting each other. You could get properly clever and automate the valves so you could switch loops at the flick of a (suitably grand) switch - which would be sweet! You are going to have to lag the whole system (apart from the chiller which should already be done) So blocks, pipes, res, pump will all attract moisture as the loop will be below ambient (or the chiller would be pointless) - If you're going down that route then I'd seriously consider a nice TEC in the loop - not hugely efficient - but great fun - and that seems to be the point of the exercise!

If you do go down this route - and since you've already 'improved' the table - I'd slap in a little 50W TEC under a metal coaster and plumb that into the loop as well - chilled PC and you beer all at the same time ;)
 
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Hmm my kind of reply :D

I have already got two large lapped peltiers from 'another project' .. think they are 400w modules. I also have the mother of all heatsinks and I was planning on using this exactly for a beer/wine cooler to be fitter somewhere inside the table. I also want to add a waterfall to take advantage of the 5 red laser diodes I bought so light up the waterfall. Other toys I have bought is a 6" stroke actuator to open and close the coffee table lid but this would also cause problems with the waterfall as it would have to tip it up, so sliding is always and option. I need to get a plan in this weekend to see which way I am going but the budget is now limited since my car insurance/tax/mot all happen to land on the same weekend :(
 
Sweet! If you do decide to go the peltier route, have a wonder over the xtremesystems forum and have a read of the info there - very helpful - and will make sure you don't turn your cooler into and oven by mistake :eek: Make sure you get lots of pics too - always makes it easier for us hard-of-reading if we can follow the pretty pictures!
 
frozennova said:
the guy your after regarding this subject can be found here by the name danny_75 IIRC even with good insualtion he ended up killing his ATi 5970
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It wasnt the cooler that killed the GPU was the silly amounts of volts i forced down its neck :)
You can run my Rig for about ? 2 hours before you see it start to form on the GPU water block. BUT remember you need to LAG and SEAL EVERYTHING!! I use Putty and Liquid tape.



The beer cooler works like a dream. Just dont get carried away :)

Dont need a rad tbh. I just used (all lagged ) 15l Res > Cooler>blocks>Res. The good thing with the cooler is you can set the temps and the time the cooler is on. 3 hours over night will keep a i7,case and 59 cool for about ? 4 hours.
I use the Maxxi 310, Useing all the loops

I run mine 24/7 and min temps.
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fastestpi.png
 
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