TLa

Sistum Id, if you know someone who is in reef hobby, you can borrow the chiller off him and post the result :-)

FrankenPC

I had about 200+ gallons in my reef aquarium before I sold that #%^#@&!!! Boy was I happy to see it go.

Anyway, yeah, I used a heavy duty titanium chiller on mine. I had to. The aggregate heat from all the pumps and the intense lighting made it mandatory. I was running two 175W halides and 4 55W power compacts if I recall correctly. Because the noise and the heat from the chiller were really pissing off my GF, I relocated the chiller outside. I drilled through the wall of the house and ran plumbing to my deck. I relegated the chiller to a doghouse (literally) to protect it from the weather.

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TLa

lol I just sold my 90G tank and got out of reef hobby in September. The damn thing broke and flooded on me. I scoop back a little more than 2k. Well, it must be strange for heavy duty chiller rated 180G tank to be quiet. What ya expect? :-)

Best of luck to keep your tank water temp. low.

The_Rocker

Great! Put some fish in it!

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Different GFX set up (Possibly 5870's)

leastbay

alright, check it out

http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php

mrkryz

The issue with this is that its relatively easy to hold 78F in an aquarium

An aquarium once its cooled to 78F (Regardless of water volume or the time required to do it) is pretty easy to hold there given that guppi's and goldfish don't radiate enough BTU's of heat to even mention lol . And no sane person puts expensive fish into an environment that will kill them before the temps are just right.

An aquarium has no significant heat source and rarely will you find a cold tank in an environment that is more then 95F ... So its really a matter of cooling a finite amount of water to 78F that has no *ACTIVE* heat source.

When you place one of these units into a PC config... your reducing the volume of water in a scenario where the temps must drop quickly despite the watts of heat increasing rapidly..... and thus loading a system several orders of magnitude beyond its rated thermal dissipation per hour.

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TLa

Yes I see your point regarding about heat source. That's also a concern if someone wants to give it a shot in this kind of setup.

In reef hobby, most hobbyists use metal halide as a light source to provide energy for photosynthesis to take place. Metal halides can range from 150W bulbs up to 1000W but most tend to use either 250W or 400W bulbs. These bulbs put a significant amount of heat and usually placed at about few inches off the water surface. You might get sun-burn effect if place your hands at few inches off these bulbs.

For my 90G reef aquarium I used 2x250W metal halide bulbs and couldn't hold the temp at even 82F. Plus all the pumps contribute to heat problem. I had to used fans and turn down the heat in winter time and max air-con in summer.

Just look at this system setup and scroll down to the Lighting section, you will see how many active heat source there are: http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2007-12/totm/index.php


The point is that heat can be an issue in aquarium and metal halides are the main *ACTIVE* heat source. The only difference is the volume of water and this might be a problem in PC setup.

Jj23

Very nice discussions on this possibility. I'd like to bring in some numbers and physics... Someone said there was no technical information available by those companies... but I found something on the biggest one that has been submitted in the topic :

The 1/3 HP one

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2006/8/review3#h2

OK so my goal here is to answer to the question : ok it's good to cool an aquarium without that much heat source but will it resist to constant heat from a PC. And a good way to solve these problems is to transfer everything in Energy.

If you look at Pulldown Specs :

The capacity specifications are intended as a guide at a room ambient temp of 86°F & heat load of 1.25 W/gallon
* 130 Gallons (27 F Pull down )
* 260 Gallons (18 F Pull down )
* 525 gallons (9 F Pull down )

And the good old equation Q = m*c*deltaT

If you look at the test they made at the bottom of the page, you will see that
in the initial power on of the device, the system pulls down temperature from
78Faranheit to 67Faranheit which correspond to a DeltaT, in celcius, of 6.11 over the course of 105 minutes.

Let's assume there is no heat transfer from the aquarium to the environnement, which is false but in the worst case, this would lead us to underestimate the power of the device. With this assumption, let's evaluate the capacity of the device. How much energy Q did we need to transfer out of the aquarium water to reach a 6.11 deltaT over 105 minutes considering a mass m of 170 kg and a heat capacity of water, which is generally a constant of 4186 J*Kg-1*C-1

The answer is Q = 4347998 Joules

but we didn't transfer this energy in a single shot, we did it over 105 minutes

So if we divide by hours, we will have the power of the device to transfer energy in an hour which gives 2484570 J/Hour, which as I discussed before is an underestimation of the device's power because we assumed that there is no heat transfer from the environnement (lightings, etc) to the aquarium. So the device should be a little bit more powerful than 2484570 J/Hour.

Now at this point of the discussion I'd like to tell you that I'm not a physicist, nor a mathematician, and I have no idea what I'm doing so if you guys know anything about electricity and power consumption and if you want to tell me I'm completely wrong, I won't be offended.

So now the question is does an equipment which pumps 2484570 J/Hour of heat is enough to cool a CPU. I'll investigate that.

Is this calculus realistic ? yes. The device spec says 2620 Btu/H and 2484570 J/Hour = 2356 Btu/H (which shows that our underestimation was of approx 300 Btu/H).

now 2620 Btu/H = 767.3 Watts (or our underestimation = 690 Watts).

As you know, computers use power supplies from 400 to 1000 watts. But these power supplies heat components that you won't include in your circuit : hard disks, dvd readers, etc...

So 767.3 Watts of heat pumpin seems more than enough to cool your CPU and maybe your GPU... Consider that the maximum wattage of your power supply (say 600 watts) is actually never reached...

I think this is really promising. Actually I've come across this thread because I plan to do exactly the same thing in 1 month, and i'll come back with a report... I have a Tai-Chi Watercooling system from Thermataltake with the whole TaiChi case and I'd like to modify it a little bit to include this device, the 1/3 HP. The numbers seem to tell us that's possible.

The only problem thats left is : are these device as good at low temperature. Because for now we investigated the behaviour of the devices at 78-67 Fareinheit, but do they ever offer the option to go lower? Also another thing to consider : 767.3 watts (or 2620 Btu/H) is the heat pumping when the device is always on. So now the % of time the device will be ON depends on how much watts a computer really pumps. I guess it can be from 400 to 600, big maximum, but how much of these watts goes into the CPU and the GPU that we want to cool ? maybe someone can bring us the answer

*Edit :

I just read something that says the whole computer generates 682.80 BTU's / H so the 1/3 HP device is like 3 times what you would need to pump the whole heat generated by the computer, including hard disks and everything That's good news Of course this is considering you want to MAINTAIN a temperature. Now what we want is more than maintain, we want to maintain it below ambiant room temperature... So I think the 1/3 HP is a good option.. costs a lot however.

USFORCES

I've thought about doing this before, they sell nice ones at a supplier in Chicago for heavy duty use, expensive though but you can set the thermostat so you don't have to worry about condensation so much but keep it cold.

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Jj23

So all these news mean we don't necessarly look for a 1/3 HP with 2600 BTU/H

Here are some 1/15 and 1/10 alternative, much lower cost

http://www.petsolutions.com/default....02680&SID=NXTG

In strict theoritical terms, the 1/10 with 1500 BTU/H may be enough to maintain it below ambient temperature, however we're walking on a small line

Here is a 1/5 HP on ebay for 319$

http://cgi.ebay.com/1-5-HP-Via-Aqua-...sid=p1638.m118

I think I'll go for 1/5 or 1/6, it's a good trade-off between performance and price.

Here is a nice 1/3 for 399$

http://cgi.ebay.com/1-3-HP-Via-Aqua-...QQcmdZViewItem