Mineral Oil cooling... Puget Systems threatened with legal action (old news!)

implosiveturnip · 28 Jan 2019 at 16:03

OK, so I have been toying with the idea of having a mineral oil cooled PC in a faux fish tank, to serve as something interesting to look at and also do some light HTPC duties (Netflix, steam in home streaming, basic browsing) and I came across a great blog by Puget Systems. It's very informative, and well worth a read if you're in the least bit interested in this sort of thing. A bit old, but still relevant if you're considering something so, well, gimmicky.

Well, I'm wasn't about to put any money into this just yet to be honest, as I'm still only flirting with the idea, however, I was sad to see this note at the bottom of the article:

Unfortunately our mineral oil aquarium PC kit project has been alleged to infringe on the patents held by a company who holds several patents related to mineral oil cooling of PCs. They offered to license this technology back to us. We decided to shut down this project instead, because the licensing cost was infeasible for this type of project, and we did not want to set a precedent of paying to license something we conceived and developed on our own.

I've reached out to Puget, in the hope that they can share some info with me regarding the original mineral oil PC they did, plus some info on parts. I'm more than happy to share that info here, provided they don't have a problem with me doing so. If anyone here has done anything similar, please do share your experience with me. I want the good, the bad and the ugly!

I also really want to know who owns these patents! Conducting a patent search is a hell of a lot more effort than I thought it would be, and I can find nothing on google. It feels like a patent troll, but I could be wrong. Would be interesting if it was a legit company that offers some mineral oil cooling solutions of their own.

TL;DR: I might oil cool HTPC, Puget Sytems did a good blog, and now I'm looking for stories/advice.

Original article on Puget's website: https://www.pugetsystems.com/mineral-oil-pc.php

Thanks in advance!

Brizzles · 28 Jan 2019 at 17:48

Patents can't stop you building one for home use.

You only infringe a patent when you profit commercially from it

implosiveturnip · 29 Jan 2019 at 09:05

Brizzles said:
Patents can't stop you building one for home use.

You only infringe a patent when you profit commercially from it

Yeah I figured that, I was just more curious as to who owns these patents and what they're using them for. As in is there another company out there offering oil-cooling kits like Puget used to?

Brizzles · 29 Jan 2019 at 11:16

implosiveturnip said:
Yeah I figured that, I was just more curious as to who owns these patents and what they're using them for. As in is there another company out there offering oil-cooling kits like Puget used to?

Probably an industrial patent.

For instance, these guys supply 'mineral oil ' based cooling for servers :

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com...oling-how-practical-is-dunking-servers-in-oil