This is what whole-house watercooling with tap water does.

dr/owned · Jan 15, 2021

Backstory: I've been doing a progression of whole-house watercooling for several years now with a 20" radiator and water-water heat exchangers at all the points where it gets plumbed into a desktop or server or whatever. In total 3 machines (for a long time it was at 4 machines). Did some checks on my tap water temperature and found it would be worth it based on my local utility cost of about $1.50 per 1000 gallons.

So here's what it looks like with another heat exchanger plumbed in with the whole house loop and the other side having a solenoid switching the pipes from the wall (tee'd off a faucet line):

It's all connected to wifi outlets so I can tell Alexa to start game mode that turns the fan off and the solenoid on without getting up from my desk. (If I left the fan running it would cool my house down because the water is significantly colder than the air temperature in here)

Radiator + fan on -> Tap water on -> Gaming temperature progression

It uses about 1 gallon per minute so $1.50 for 1000 minutes of using it. Inb4 "but that's a waste of water!". It's going into a closed sewer system and is fully reclaimed. That's why it's so cheap to begin with because there's very little 'waste'. In the summer it will probably be a net-positive environment effect because AC is absurdly expensive to run here.

j o e · Jan 16, 2021

very very very neat man

essanbee · Jan 16, 2021

Great project. No need for people to worry about wasting water though, because you can't.

8051 · Jan 16, 2021

essanbee said:
Great project. No need for people to worry about wasting water though, because you can't.

Someone once said that all the water that has ever been on this earth is still here -- minus any taken into space by astronauts.

0WallyWest0 · Jan 16, 2021

8051 said:
Someone once said that all the water that has ever been on this earth is still here -- minus any taken into space by astronauts.

And unless they stepped outside to pee that water came back with them.

8051 · Jan 16, 2021

0WallyWest0 said:
And unless they stepped outside to pee that water came back with them.

Did the astronauts who landed on the moon bother bringing their urine back with them? Or did they leave it on the lunar lander? Or all the urine on the ISS?

Blameless · Jan 16, 2021

dr/owned said:
Backstory: I've been doing a progression of whole-house watercooling for several years now with a 20" radiator and water-water heat exchangers at all the points where it gets plumbed into a desktop or server or whatever. In total 3 machines (for a long time it was at 4 machines). Did some checks on my tap water temperature and found it would be worth it based on my local utility cost of about $1.50 per 1000 gallons.

So here's what it looks like with another heat exchanger plumbed in with the whole house loop and the other side having a solenoid switching the pipes from the wall (tee'd off a faucet line):

View attachment 2474387

It's all connected to wifi outlets so I can tell Alexa to start game mode that turns the fan off and the solenoid on without getting up from my desk. (If I left the fan running it would cool my house down because the water is significantly colder than the air temperature in here)

Radiator + fan on -> Tap water on -> Gaming temperature progression

View attachment 2474386

It uses about 1 gallon per minute so $1.50 for 1000 minutes of using it. Inb4 "but that's a waste of water!". It's going into a closed sewer system and is fully reclaimed. That's why it's so cheap to begin with because there's very little 'waste'. In the summer it will probably be a net-positive environment effect because AC is absurdly expensive to run here.

I wouldn't imagine there would be much at only 1GPM, but is there any noticeable pressure loss at the taps when you have water flowing through the heat exchanger?

essanbee said:
No need for people to worry about wasting water though, because you can't.

8051 said:
Someone once said that all the water that has ever been on this earth is still here -- minus any taken into space by astronauts.

Wasting water has nothing to do with destroying it or removing it from the planet. It's about taking potable water from natural sources faster than it can be replenished (which can cause other major problems like subsidence or saltwater intrusion), leading to scarcity. It also puts additional strain on water supply and reclamation infrastructure and can exacerbate water pollution via run off or the aforementioned intrusion.

The water still existing, somewhere, is little consolation if aquifers run dry or brackish water starts coming out of them, or if a city or town starts sinking. You might be able to source water from somewhere else, but that's going to be expensive. Reclaiming land that's been poisoned by salt is even harder and you can't reverse subsidence at all.

Unless the OP lives in an area where water is scarce and/or has heavily subsidized water costs (which would skew figures), cooling with tap water may well be the most efficient means accomplish the OP's goals, especially if electricity costs are high. However, the idea that water cannot be wasted is crazy talk.

0WallyWest0 said:
And unless they stepped outside to pee that water came back with them.

8051 said:
Did the astronauts who landed on the moon bother bringing their urine back with them? Or did they leave it on the lunar lander? Or all the urine on the ISS?

In LEO, even if they ejected their waste, much of it probably still came back to Earth.

The Gemini and Apollo missions dumped their waste and, in the case of Apollo, it often wouldn't be coming back. There was certainly no point in reducing the missions' total delta-v budget by carrying waste back from the moon, so it was left behind. That said, I'd imagine that Earth has lost vastly more water as ejecta from large impact events than humans will ever remove.

The ISS recycles most of it's water.

dr/owned · Jan 16, 2021

Blameless said:
I wouldn't imagine there would be much at only 1GPM, but is there any noticeable pressure loss at the taps when you have water flowing through the heat exchanger?

No noticeable impact. The plumbing can push out about 7GPM total from a single outlet (modern construction, 1" supply line, probably 60psi, fans out to 1/2" lines at all the fixtures). So as you can figure I have the valve set really tight to get such low flow. I tried about 0.5gpm and it allowed about a 2-3 degree delta.

You're correct about water use potentially mattering. It's possible to convert the water to a form that's not very useful anymore (like making it radioactive) or move it to a place where it's not needed but fortunately neither one applies to my situation. There's a small electrical cost to reclaiming the water and pump it, but when done at a municipal scale it's probably negligible. I wouldn't be surprised to learn most of the cost per gallon is to maintain and build the infrastructure and not to deliver the water itself. My water/sewer/trash bill is dominated by base-charges and not actual usage: last bill was $60 for only 2000 gallons of water usage.

Slaughtahouse · Jan 16, 2021

Just so I understand the concept, the water-to-water heat exchangers are there to salvage heat to warm up a adjacent fixture / faucet and the “grey water” from the PC is wasted?

And the fan located above the heat exchanger is a means of introducing heat exchange to warm up ambient air?

However, after testing, you found with a loop at 32c to 29c* it’s still providing cooling? Even in the winter? Where is the prob for ambient temp?

Sorry for all the questions, this is just a really cool and interesting project!

Arctucas · Jan 16, 2021

What type of filtration are you using?

dr/owned · Jan 16, 2021

Slaughtahouse said:
Just so I understand the concept, the water-to-water heat exchangers are there to salvage heat to warm up a adjacent fixture / faucet and the “grey water” from the PC is wasted?

And the fan located above the heat exchanger is a means of introducing heat exchange to warm up ambient air?

However, after testing, you found with a loop at 32c to 29c* it’s still providing cooling? Even in the winter? Where is the prob for ambient temp?

Sorry for all the questions, this is just a really cool and interesting project!

Best way to describe a heat exchanger is a water to water version of a radiator. A radiator is a type of heat exchanger...just air to water. The goal being to have a "dirty" side and a "clean" side that you don't want mixing. For 2/3 of the heat exchangers I don't want to mix tap water with Mayhem X1 and for the most recent one pictured I didn't want to use fresh tap water 24x7 or have it mixing with the UV sterilized tap water, so I can turn off that half and the existing half that goes through a radiator can keep running.

My ambient air never really goes below about 27C and I run the (20") fan on the radiator really, really slow so it is inaudible, so even at low heat loads I get a water temperature of ~30C and it goes up even more under load. With the tap water it's silent and 21C (although there is noise in the plumbing from water flowing), and I can scale it up so it's effectively an infinite amount of heat sinking and would never increase in temperature. The fan would have to run faster and get louder to scale up.

Arctucas said:
What type of filtration are you using?

Only UV sterilization on the 10 gallons feeding the whole house. I want to say it's a 25W unit but it's been a while since I've had to mess with it. At every desktop/server there's a heat exchanger where the other side to the UV sterilized tap water is Mayhem X1.

The key was to make sure the whole-house loop is a closed loop and not an open body of water. That was an absolute disaster of scum building up and requiring UV, particle filtration, and chemicals. Similar what Linus found in whole-room watercooling but at least for me I wasn't feeding that water directly into PC loops.

Slaughtahouse · Jan 16, 2021

Thanks for the detailed feedback. I think the answer I was seeking was misunderstood. The concept of heat exchanger is clear, cheers

To simplify my question, what is the function of the w2w heat exchanger in your system? Is it passive way to dissipate heat (by exchanging heat to your white / clean water)?

My interpretation:
Line 1 - Cold Tap water comes in, warm tap water comes out.
Line 2 - Warm PC loop water comes in, Cold PC water comes out.

If that is true, what is the purpose of the fan sitting on top of the w2w heat exchanger?

Thanks in advance

dr/owned · Jan 26, 2021

Slaughtahouse said:
Thanks for the detailed feedback. I think the answer I was seeking was misunderstood. The concept of heat exchanger is clear, cheers

To simplify my question, what is the function of the w2w heat exchanger in your system? Is it passive way to dissipate heat (by exchanging heat to your white / clean water)?

My interpretation:
Line 1 - Cold Tap water comes in, warm tap water comes out.
Line 2 - Warm PC loop water comes in, Cold PC water comes out.

If that is true, what is the purpose of the fan sitting on top of the w2w heat exchanger?

Thanks in advance

ooof, didn't see your reply so apologies on the delay.

You got the setup exactly right, 4 ports on the heat exchanger with tap water warming up (in vs. out) and pc loop cooling down (in vs. out).

The fan is just there to cool off the solenoid that is switching the tap water on/off. Because it's an electromagnet being held stationary, the force that is generated by the magnetic field gets converted to heat (like an induction cooktop). In theory the solenoid shouldn't need active cooling with a fan but it's a chinese knockoff so I don't really believe their claim of "coil rated to 100C". It was off gassing quite a lot when I didn't have the fan on it, stinking up the room with a burning plastic smell. On IR camera I saw it getting up to about 170F and with the fan it's down to 120F.

Slaughtahouse · Feb 25, 2021

dr/owned said:
ooof, didn't see your reply so apologies on the delay.

You got the setup exactly right, 4 ports on the heat exchanger with tap water warming up (in vs. out) and pc loop cooling down (in vs. out).

The fan is just there to cool off the solenoid that is switching the tap water on/off. Because it's an electromagnet being held stationary, the force that is generated by the magnetic field gets converted to heat (like an induction cooktop). In theory the solenoid shouldn't need active cooling with a fan but it's a chinese knockoff so I don't really believe their claim of "coil rated to 100C". It was off gassing quite a lot when I didn't have the fan on it, stinking up the room with a burning plastic smell. On IR camera I saw it getting up to about 170F and with the fan it's down to 120F.

Crystal clear! Thanks for responding

Your response got lost in my notifications. I apologize for only reading it now lol

Questors · Oct 9, 2021

dr/owned said:
Backstory: I've been doing a progression of whole-house watercooling for several years now with a 20" radiator and water-water heat exchangers at all the points where it gets plumbed into a desktop or server or whatever. In total 3 machines (for a long time it was at 4 machines). Did some checks on my tap water temperature and found it would be worth it based on my local utility cost of about $1.50 per 1000 gallons.

So here's what it looks like with another heat exchanger plumbed in with the whole house loop and the other side having a solenoid switching the pipes from the wall (tee'd off a faucet line):

View attachment 2474387

It's all connected to wifi outlets so I can tell Alexa to start game mode that turns the fan off and the solenoid on without getting up from my desk. (If I left the fan running it would cool my house down because the water is significantly colder than the air temperature in here)

Radiator + fan on -> Tap water on -> Gaming temperature progression

View attachment 2474386

It uses about 1 gallon per minute so $1.50 for 1000 minutes of using it. Inb4 "but that's a waste of water!". It's going into a closed sewer system and is fully reclaimed. That's why it's so cheap to begin with because there's very little 'waste'. In the summer it will probably be a net-positive environment effect because AC is absurdly expensive to run here.

The bold and italicized in the quote directly above this.

Do you also pay for sewage? If so, is it a flat rate? The town where I live, we pay for water and sewage as separate services rather than two parts of the same service. If we use $50.00 of water in a month (for example only) the sewage bill will automatically be a percentage higher (used to know it). So the sewage portion of the bill would be somewhere around $65.00, solid waste and all that. For me this would not be cheap or cost effective. It made me wonder if you had considered this or if it's not the same where you live?

Necroposting, just found this so....

This is what whole-house watercooling with tap water does.

dr/owned

j o e

essanbee

8051

0WallyWest0

8051

Blameless

dr/owned

Slaughtahouse

Arctucas

dr/owned

Slaughtahouse

dr/owned

Slaughtahouse

Questors

Top Contributors this Month

Recommended Communities