Water system full of DIRT (Strong chemical reaction but to WHAT)

[Mjello]

After a year of good running i suddenly noticed:

My watersystem was full of dirt. Brown solid dirt. The water ressourvior was full off foam and there was high pressure inside the system. Air was venting when I opened the refill hole.

Now this transpired quickly. I am not away from my computer more than a few days at a time.

My system is a Koolance EXOS unit with standard cpu cooler (cobber with gold plating) A cobber gpu cooler and the aluminium radiator in the koolance system. The mixed liquid which came with the unit was used as coolant. The system is on 24 hours a day.

Apparently some form of chemical reaction has happened.

I've heard of aluminium (radiator) ionising with cobber (gpu cooler) but can this create such a strong reaction.

I am mystified by this event and would like to know of anyone who has experienced the same or might have an explanation for this.

 

[gotensan01]

yeah, you can't mix copper and aluminum. Otherwise it gets adonized or something. If you are mixing the two, you need some special additive in your water. Since it already formed, I don't know what you can do. Bump for you so you can find answer.

 

[stevennoland]

This is the first I have heard of this. I have a H2O rig consisting of: Danger Den CPU (Maze 4) and support chipset block. Both these blocks are copper. My radiator is the Black Ice Extreme (also copper core). My fluid is distilled water with Water Wetter (from Red Line) with blue dye. I have had the system running for over 9 months with no probs. The reaction between the copper and aluminum is a good culprit. I would dump the radiator, and get a good copper core one.

 

[klah]

http://www.overclockers.com/tips1041/

We all know that having a copper block and an aluminum radiator is bad. Now, you can add an additive to your water to slow corrosion down to a bare minimum, but going all copper is just the better way to go.

I will attempt to explain this whole process, so that you can have a better understanding of how this works, why this works, and how to prevent it from happening....

 

[Mjello]

Thanks everybody...

I have now cleaned my system and are running on a 1/10 koolance premixed fluid and distilled water. No sign of the problem developing again.

But I must point out how suddenly it happened. I was running for over ayear. And then suddenly it happened inside of a week and what I have found out about cobber and alu. is that a reaction takes very long time to develope and there are no signs of actual change to the surface of the gpu cobber watercooler in the system.

From what I gather from the web it was actually caused by minute evaporation of the water in the system over the year I have used it.

This made the water/all sorts of chemicals solution provided by Koolance eventually become saturated. And then the actual chemicalls would fall out of the water (has a fancy expression in english however I am not a native speaker of the language) and become the dirt I found in my system.

 

[CubanlB]

um, yeah, COPPER.
I dont know what cobber is, where as, I know cobbler is tasty.
Many metals will corrode when there is another type of metal in the water with it. It's even worse when its your house and it kills the water presure to your shower and you have to redo the whole house w/ copper.

 

[Mday]

Originally posted by: Mjello
Thanks everybody...

I have now cleaned my system and are running on a 1/10 koolance premixed fluid and distilled water. No sign of the problem developing again.

But I must point out how suddenly it happened. I was running for over ayear. And then suddenly it happened inside of a week and what I have found out about cobber and alu. is that a reaction takes very long time to develope and there are no signs of actual change to the surface of the gpu cobber watercooler in the system.

From what I gather from the web it was actually caused by minute evaporation of the water in the system over the year I have used it.

This made the water/all sorts of chemicals solution provided by Koolance eventually become saturated. And then the actual chemicalls would fall out of the water (has a fancy expression in english however I am not a native speaker of the language) and become the dirt I found in my system.

no, it was cuz the oxidation built up to such a point as to dislodge itself from the actual structure, and then accumulate.