Sorry, the vendor was answering my question about the ambient temp, the room temp, when they said 100F. Sorry for the mis-understanding.

---

Please check out my blog
http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com
http://facebook.com/sciencesprings

I am going to solve my ambient heat problem with some low tech dollars: a simple window air conditioner for the room, maybe 6-8000BTU. The room is only about 12FT X 12FT.

The house has central air conditioning; but my digiteria is at the end of the line pressure wise. So, to cool the room, I would need to freeze everyone else out of the house.

Window units not only use a lot of energy, they're also pretty noisy.

There is a $0 solution. If all of the cool air from the central AC is going into the other rooms then partially block the cold air vents in those rooms. That should force more cold air into the digiteria. Experiment with how much you need to block them off, if a little isn't enough then try a little more. Rooms on the north side of the house can probably take the most blocking because they don't get as much sun. If you block vents in other rooms you can also turn the temperature on the thermostat down because those rooms won't cool as much due to the blocked vents.

In the winter I use the same idea to push more heat to a room that is at the end of the hot air duct in my house and less heat to rooms that are closer to the furnace and get more than enough hot air.

Good point. I also do this, and it works well. Close un needed vents.

Yes, I know; but my wife - you remember my wife - really gets quite cold when I have the A/C running. So, a window unit, expensive as it is, may have to be the ticket.

I can personally tolerate heat in the room up to about 80-85 F, if I use my fan.

Who's your candidate for "The Cup"? Right now, we have the Devils and I think the Rangers.

---

Please check out my blog
http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com
http://facebook.com/sciencesprings

The Cup? What's that?

Lord Stanley's Cup?

---

Please check out my blog
http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com
http://facebook.com/sciencesprings

Rangers. My blues got taken out, but that was expected....

Ah, shlockey. Got no time for that crap. Other than a shlockey player, who is stupid enough to remove gloves and pound a hard plastic helmet with their unprotected fists? Btw, we often get blamed for inventing that crap but we didn't. We invented hockey and it has nothing to do with shlockey.

Take it your from Canada......

One of the things we did was set the central AC fan to on. In this mode, the fan on the central AC runs all the time that this drastically moderates the temps to keep the computer room cooler without freezing the rest of the house. The downside is that after 5 years, the fan motor went up in smoke and it was not inexpensive to replace (DC motor, variable speed, bla bla bla).

The temps have been between 50F - 65F so I open the garage doors early in the morning to cool the area as much as possible. The computers and the sun heat it up all day and then I open the doors for a while again at night. This will work for now but the hot days and nights are on the way.

I really like http://www.ha-soft.cz/watercooling and would like to use an automotive radiator. It would be great to get 3 GPUs and my CPU all together with a dual pump configuration running on an external power source. 9 fans will do but I would likely just mount a box fan to one side of that radiator, maybe a fan on each side.

The discussion on 220V / 110V to the home was interesting. In my electrical box, we get 220V from the meter. One leg of the 220V energizes one column of breakers and the other leg of the 220V energizes the other column. A neutral runs down the middle. I am sure I am not wasting one side of my 220V.

Please update this thread with results from your cooling solutions.

The discussion on 220V / 110V to the home was interesting. In my electrical box, we get 220V from the meter. One leg of the 220V energizes one column of breakers and the other leg of the 220V energizes the other column. A neutral runs down the middle. I am sure I am not wasting one side of my 220V.

That is exactly what I meant.

---

Please check out my blog
http://sciencesprings.wordpress.com
http://facebook.com/sciencesprings

I'm not sure what goes on in the electric panel. I could be wrong but if I am then I know a Master Electrician and power engineer who are wrong too. Whatever.

Automotive radiators work well but they can be very expensive. What you're paying for is high heat exchange rate in a compact design. You need that in a vehicle but not necessarily in a home where you have a lot more room than in a vehicle. You can get auto rads cheaper used from an auto wrecker but you never know what condition they're in. They might leak or they may be filled with mineral deposits that reduce their efficiency if they weren't maintained properly.

Another thing about auto radiators is that they work best when air is being pushed through them. That's no problem in a moving vehicle and when the vehicle is not moving you can start up a fan. Those fans make a lot of noise and the air rushing between the waffles makes noise too. You might not want that in a house. A better solution for a house, IMHO, is a radiator desgned to work on simple, quiet convection.

I used tube-fin radiator for my homemade liquid cooling systems. They work on convection and here is a picture of tube-fin radiator. It's used extensively in baseboard hot water designs. Notice how simple it is compared to an auto rad. I think tube-fin can give you the same cooling capacity as an automotive rad for a lot less money and no need for a fan. I must admit I am not sure of the price for fin-tube because a friend who works at a place that manufactures fin-tube salvaged it for me from their scrap bin. Five feet of tube-fin can dissipate a lot of heat and since it's just a straight smooth tube you don't need high pump pressure. I'm pretty sure you can buy it in home improvement stores like Home Depot. If not then I'm sure a plumbing store would order a length for you.

Automatic transmission auxillary coolers are not expensive and should work very well too.

You can make a decent rad yourself from 20 feet of soft copper pipe. Wrap the 20 feet around a 15" to 20" diameter cylinder to form a coil then remove the cylinder. It's compact, cheap and dissipates quite a bit of heat. Put it in front of a fan and you can dissipate even more. Put it over an air conditioning vent and it gets even better. The nice thing about it is that you can buy it in 1/4" and 3/8" diameter sizes which is very near the size of the hose you would attach to a water block. That saves money on adaptors and fittings. Compression fittings are great but if you slide a hose over a properly prepared pipe and put the right size gear clamp over the hose you get a good dependable seal that way too. If you can solder then it all becomes even easier.

Whatever you do, don't dump the heat into the house. Take a 12" long by 5/8" diameter drill bit (rent one or borrow one from the cable TV installer) and punch 2 holes through your wall to the outdoors. If you put the holes between the wall studs and below the height of your electrical receptacles you won't hit any electrical lines. Push the hose or copper pipe through the holes, plug the holes up with silicon caulking, buy colored caulking to match the color of the walls if you're really fussy but in 2 weeks you'll forget about it and won't see it anyway. Then plumb any kind of radiator you want outside and any water block you want inside. This kind of arrangement avoids heating up the computer room. It works best on the north side of the building where there is less sun but it can work on the south side too. The beauty of fin-tube or a copper coil is that if what you build doesn't dissipate enough heat you can double the capacity very easy.

I made my own pump, just a simple diaphragm pump powered by compressed air. You can buy a million different pumps as stock items from various suppliers. If you buy one from a computer stor you'll end up paying double what it's worth or more. I've heard aquarium pumps are inexpensive and very durable.

Still, in the end, after playing with all sorts of liquid cooling designs I have to recommend against it. Just push the air from the GPU directly to the outdoors via a duct or by putting the exhaust directly in front of a window fan. It works just as good and it doesn't get much cheaper than that. Believe someone who has actually tried both.