Water-Cooling inside a Refrigerator.

[Circlenaut]

I just came up with this idea a couple of minutes ago. Take a mini refrigerator so you can put all of your components inside, get a water-cooling system and put it inside the refrigerator. Make the refrigerator temp run just above freezing or put antifreeze instead of water and put the temp down to the minimum. I don't have the stuff to do this but it might be a thought to you people out there.

 

[Belegost]

One word: condensation.
Try opening your fridge and feeling around, you'll find that most of it is wet, you would need a way to dry the air in the box.

 

[Generalen]

It's a better idea to put only your water resevoar in that "fridge"

 

[Dazmite]

I tried this last year, sort of. I didn't put the components in the fridge. But it isn't cost effective. Once you let the coolant cool to around 35 degrees, which is roughly 18-20 hours, When you sart up the PC it takes about an hour to bring the temps up to the 75-80 degree mark. The fridge can not keep up with the warm water. It takes more energy to cool it, so the fridge ends up running almost constantly.
Still condensation is a bad factor, This is what lead to the end of my experiment. The cost of a new CPU and MB stops me from proceeding further with it.

Daz

 

[Spazz11]

how about a mini refrigeration unit that uses Freon? I dont know how youl make a mini compressor run quiet, but thats probably gonna be the next step in high tech component cooling

 

[DragonFire]

I using this idea right now, well sort of.......I found out just like what Dazmite said, my little fridge cant keep up after the water temp gets so hot. In fact once the water was warm as it can get my cpu temps were around 50C. I was getting about 41-42C with just the watercooler in my case. Then I had another idea, the cooling coils which make up the little freezer could be taken off from the wall.......Using the bottom oh a small trashcan, I bent the freezer down intill about a inch of it was in the water which is about all I can get into it. So far it seems to work, under full load for 4+ hours my cpu temp never went above 30C. Which I think is reall good since Im running a 1.4Ghz at 1.6Ghz at 1.80 volts. There are only two problems that I have found.

1) The fridge seems to run all the time even tho I put the temp probe in the water....

2) I'm not sure if its normal or not but the outside of the fridge seems to get rather warm to almost hot. I dont know if its because the thing never turns off or what. I'd like to hear any ideas about this and ways to maybe fix it if its a problem.

As for condensation, I have yet to any. My case temp is only 5C lower then my cpu temp, I cant see water forming on the waterblock anytime soon.

 

[Garion]

Most of those little refrigerators are really designed to cool stuff down then keep it that way. You are pumping a lot of heat into it all the time - Probably going to be more than it can really handle in the long run, methinks. Also, be careful. If it goes out and you're not home that cool little compartment will turn into a sauna as your radiator gets rid of all of it's excess heat in the fridge. Could heat things up RAPIDLY.

- G

 

[guitronics]

This has been done repeatedly,but it's good to know people are continuing to experiment.kyrotech.com
(Looks like they went out of business!)was the first company that I know of to put a refrigeration unit into a computer case. It wasn't cheap,but it worked well.

In any event, your main problems will be 1- Catastrophic failure of the cooling system, overheating, and CPU burnout, and 2-Condensation.

If you decide to Liquid cool your 'puter,look up articles at overclockers.com,andmaximumpc.com,and anywhere else you can find info. on cooling.

The MaxPC link has an article on heatpipes.Excellent reading.

The way to eliminate condensation is to use closed-cell foam,on the liquid pipes inside your case, and around the CPU.You should even put some behind the Motherboard,behind the cpu,and be generous in your coverage area.You could silicone-glue the stuff on, but common silicone has acetic acid in it, a boo-boo where it comes to fine wire traces.It will corrode them, even eat them away over time.

So you need a non-acid form of silicone glue(I don't know where you'd get it)...or some non-conductive epoxy, or simple'crazy glue'.

A water block is placed on top of the CPU,use some Arctic II to glue that sucker on(Thermal Epoxy).Then you wanna make sure you insulate the whole deal with closed-cell foam.

This way, you'll not have any condensation problems.And make darn sure none of your pipes leak!

Silicone tubing is an excellent use for this application, along with a high-flow aquarium pump.You can make the stuff yourself, or buy it (ouch!!!) frommelcor.com.Good luck.