Multiple systems sharing pump & rad
 

Hm, thinking about watercooling both of my pcs, but not fitting a rad and pump in each one, but keeping a large pump & rad in an external box and feeding the water in parallel through the 2 systems. I was just wondering if this was feasable, and I need some pump recommendations.
Maybe I'll hook up more systems to this later on, and replace the rad with a water chiller... Mainly trying to quiet everything down, not really aiming for killer cooling atm, maybe later...

Get a heatercore and a good 500GPH or better pump.

If you water chill this later.. with more PC's.. you are going to need a fierce compressor in that sucker.. that's if you go with phase change water chiller.. A 1/2HP compressor to do a bunch of machines.. and do it good.

In my opinion.. you should get 2 via aqua 1300's.. Be about 40 dollars.. Use them in a dual pump setup..

If you use a reservoir.. you could have the one pump push water threw the system and the other suck it.. heh.. so do like this

One pump pushes the water through and when your water line comes back into the reservoir.. plug it into the inlet of the 2nd pump.. if you see what i mean.. You could have a really kick ass closed system by having the outlet of the first pump.. pump water through the system.. then the return water line would get plugged into the inlet of the 2nd pump and then the outlet of the 2nd pump would get put into the inlet of the 1st pump.. kinda confusing but it would give you a seriously huge head pressure.. You'd have a really good flow rate.

you might be able to get some ideas from what I did....


linkage

a small heater core has absolutely no trouble with cooling my 4 Durons, and the pump. proly will be able to handle right up to 10 CPU's maybe with an added fan to the mix.

|PuNiSh3R|: Via 1300's? Hmm, just browsing through some other active threads at the moment I haven't really heard many great things about those... And might be a problem to find them around here... Maybe one of those nice 1000-2000 gph pumps :) Maybe that would be overkill though

#Rotor: read through that a few times already :) nice to see that such a small heatercore can handle that load... Maybe I'll try to find something larger so I can go fan-less or with a (few) really really quiet fans at 5v or 7v... mmm... lovely sillence :)

For tubes i was thinking about using 3/4" or 1" for the main lines, and 1/2" (for cpu) or 3/8" (gpu and other stuff) internal, maybe it would be a problem to find a heatercore with 3/4" or 1" fittings... else I might get 2 heatercores and pass the water through them in parallel, that should fix any bottlenecks that might arrise.

I'll think some more about this the comming weeks, and I'll try to start working on this next month.

most heater cores have 3/4 as std. some has them in combination 3/4 and 7/8 , which is sometimes a bit of a problem, more than an advantage, i think... I went 3/4 just because the core i'm using has them in that size....

Had some fun, drew a diagram:
http://home.pi.be/~p4u02228/diagram_01.png

It shows the 2 pumps idea... which might also provide some kind of redundancy... So I might go with that. Also i'll try to make the res the highest part in the system to dual it as an airtrap. And the "eletronics" box on the diagram is going to be the most interesting :) Pumps will get their power from there, and all data from the thermistors will be sent to a small microcontroler (pic or 8051, haven't made up my mind yet), which will log it and broadcast it to all the pcs. Maybe I could make it so that you have to press a button on that box to boot the pc, that would allow some extra checks, and the pcs could be powered down when the temps raise too much (either by cutting the power, or by sending a shutdown command which would be processed by a daemon)... this could be an interesting project :)
hmm, thinking about this, a 28 pin pic combined with 256kb or EEPROM should work fine i think...

Anyone has some comments?

Nice diagram, but I would consider using a parallel setup to run the tubing to each PC. Equal flow and equal temp. of water to each unit that way.

Hmm, they are in parallel on the diagram (or atleast i ment it that way)... The water won't flow through the 2 PCs in one loop (if you know what i mean...)

The 2 pump setup like I said will add 100% redundancy.. If one pump fails.. the other one will keep the water flowing going at the same rate..

I have no problems with my via aqua.. never did.. It even works at extremely cold water temps..

ok well for simplicity 1 resivior 1 big radiator a good heater core would probably do the job with a medium-high speed fan. now i wouldnt bother going out hitting a Y and comming back into another Y connection its going to add alot of resistance and your flow rate will hurt. if you were going to do that id recomend a danner 1200. personaly what i would do is get one large resivior 5-10 gallons install two pumps in the bottom one goes to each cpu then you join them at a single Y at the end of the loop just before the heater core.

now if you want slightly better temps than with the heater core you need just a few more parts and id say change that 5-10 gallon resivior into a bong which requires no Y joint at all just get two cheep walmart plastic shower heads drill out the flow resistor and mount htem at the top of a ~3' length of 4" pvc get a 4" pvc WYE(recomend double WYE) and mount that to the top of the resivior then have the cpu returns go to the two shower heads. now you just put medium-high speed fans in the WYE blowing in now for two cpus id say you will need atleast 60cfm of airflow id get two 40cfm sunons and put them on a double wye OR rig a set of 120's cus they are only slightly larger than a 4" opening so it would be easy to shroud them down so you could get a set of panflow 80cfms and have a total ambient noise from the fans at like 40dba. plus killer results from your bong cooler then you just need to make sure to fill it on a regular basis and also add about 1tsb of bleach per 1 1/2 gallon to prevent any bacteria forming.

ssjwizzard: i'm totaly not interested in using a bong. And, spliting the loop into different loops isn't what I want to do, as I prolly add more computers later on, that would give 3+ pumps using the way you discribed. Also, I doubt if I should use Y thinggies, or T thinggies at the pcs... Honestly I think T pieces would be easier and I can't really see disadvantages of using them...
And also you actualy said "one to each cpu", that would require me to use 3 pumps for these 2 pcs... a bit uhm... inefficient. And if you would have read my post you would have noticed that I'm interested in moving this to a waterchiller later on, and that I have no advantages in using a bong atm as it is more work, and will be dumped in a few months anyhow.

lol

What is the distants between the 2 PC's?

A water chiller for several PC's..

PLEASE! CONTACT ME ABOUT BUILDING THAT! WOOHOO!

Not that large distance... the space below my desk isn't that huge :)
And I sure will keep you guys informed about the progress... :D

Oh yea... and the "2 pcs" thing is only temporary, I plan to add a few more later on... (for now it would be a tbird 1ghz & dual p2 333mhz). And also I don't need to hit sub-zero water temps with the chiller, as long as it chills the water a bit i'm happy (0-15° C or so would be nice... atleast I don't have to bother with antifreeze things then)

From an efficiency standpoint the fewer motors you have running the more electrically efficient the system (and this applies to noise as well.) So I recomend that you buy one pump that will handle your design criteria (If you can afford that many computers I don't think you'll have a problem shelling out the extra for a "real" water pump (Oh and me,... my Eheim is in the mail... it is still just an aquarium pump:)

Tokamac

KISS baby.. (keep it simple stupid)

go with one pump.. I agree..

hmm... problem is that those larger aquarium pumps are a bit harder to find, maybe i should go with a fountain pump :)
And i dunno... wouldn't 2 pumps offer some kind of redundancy?

Please... no fountain pumps. Believe me... the one thing I learned from my watercooling experience is that head capacity is more important than flowrate due to the fact that most mag drive pumps are poor at producing any great amount of pressure. I'm concerned that if you buy a pump with a huge flowrate you'll end up running on the tail end of the pump's H-Q curve (sort of like I am... :rolleyes: ). With that said though, it's very hard to estimate what size pump is needed before you build... and it's even harder to find one that has a good pump curve that balances head with flow in the range that you'll be operating in.

Ok... was that confusing? Simply said, I am suggesting that you look for a pump with at least 20' of lift if you're going to have any sort of long runs... though the more you have the better (without getting carried away of course). Oh, and I totally agree with your tubing selection for the mains... 1" would help reduce any wall friction in the tubes greatly.

well i found some nice fountain/pound pumps, though i forgot which brand they were :( But they had pretty nice flow at 20'... problem might be finding a pump with a 1" inlet/outlet :( any suggestions would be welcome

The problem is, 20' is likely near the cutoff of the pump, so regardless of whether or not it's still moving a good volume of water, it'll be doing it very inefficiently.

hmm still thinking about this, but i still have a problem with the pump(s)... mainly because i'm in europe and i can't find any danners/little giants/decently priced iwakis/....
So if you guys could give me any pump advice about pumps available in europe... i'ld be grateful... And i drew up another diagram some day, as i have to decide between using T-fittings and 2 manifolds: http://home.pi.be/~p4u02228/watercooling_setup.png