Right now I want to crawl into a corner and cry. After having a nightmare getting the bits for my i7 build in time for this weekend, I have spent most of today pulling my system apart and moving my system around, I took my graphics card out of the loop and changed my pump from a massive old thing to a Laing DDC Ultra, I added water and thought I'd give the pump a run and check for leaks, I wanted to do this without my new mobo and bits in so I got a 12v 2 Amp PSU (think its an old electric train psu) and connected the pump to it, nothing happened. The pump should be powerful enough, my dad uses it to power an inspection lamp and thats more than 18w. Now I will have to drain some water out to remove the pump.
I feel like ditching water cooling and buying a new case and a cpu cooler and returning to air
It makes it worse after all the hassle I had because I wanted it built this weekend, see my rant thread in general.
Someone cheer me up please.
I feel like ditching water cooling and buying a new case and a cpu cooler and returning to air

It makes it worse after all the hassle I had because I wanted it built this weekend, see my rant thread in general.
Someone cheer me up please.

As I said, the 10W ddc pro I have makes virtually no sound, only a very very slight hum, maybe partly because I have the feet suspended between homemade silicone rubber blocks. Before filling the system I had read you generally have to flick the power on and off to avoid running the pump dry as you fill the rez. However as I said above the first few times I quickly flicked it on and off nothing happened, there was no water movement and it wasn't sucked into the pump. This was say a one second flick on-off. I was expecting it to instantly suck the water down the moment I flicked the switch but it didn't. I was exactly the same as you, I thought bloody hell the pump is knackered, but before giving up I just flicked it on and left it and after about 3 seconds it sprang to life and it didn't half suck the water down fast, emptied the res in less than a second so I had to be fast on the psu switch to switch it off. Since then whenever I switch it on it does exactly the same thing, I think the motor uses a soft start circuit to protect itself. So how long were you leaving it on for? Can you set up a simple t line mini loop with the ddc, it would be easy to fully prime it before switching on. Hook it up to a spare molex on your pc and see if it works.