Passive Radiator for 30 bucks

[FizzledFiend]

found this "thing" for lack of a better word @ a salvage warehouse the other day. It got the ole noodle to working so I snatched it up. Have had it sitting here for atleast 2 weeks and got to chatting with JFetting the other night on messenger. He urged me to set it up and test it out.

so for some background info:
AMD Barton 2500+ from 1.8 to 2.5 200X12.5
1 gig of Corsair XMS DDR 400
assloads of HDDs
Liquid cooled: RBX water block, Swiftech GPU block, Chevy Caprice heatercore, 120V blower, and a quiet one pond pump (just freakin huge)
anyways i fold 24/7 and case temps run 24 celcius and core reads 37



now this is how it all works right now...want more details ask away

this is what I found

it's length on the finned area

inlet size

I slapped these together for testing purposes..I would have much rather used all copper conections, but LOWES is sort of shity with copper this size...in fact they had nothing that would work.....I was pressed for time to get supplies (borrowed pops lowes CC card )


ok now here is the question i put towards you. I have a crawl space under my home that stays noticbly cooler than the outside temps. I had to go buy a small window AC unit to drive down temps in my small 10X10 lab this summer. I am wanting to get the HEAT out of my room so i was thinking of plumbing this baby to the outside under the house. Recon it would be worth the trouble or should i just knock out the rad and plumb this in place and se how things go for now. I mean if it don't cool worth a flip then no point in working my tail off to put under house right? Where should i start?

Before you start in on it..trust me my pump will more than handle it...has like 250 GPH @ a head of 6 foot.

[killernoodle]

Wow.... that thing is big!

looks like it will do the job admirably, although it would be nice to have some kind of turbulence in that tube I think.

[yargman]

yeah, that thing looks awesome, do you know what the original part was called?

but wouldn't you want the fins to run perpendicular to the ground, so that air can rise up from all of the fins? If you look at innovatek's and zalman's passive offerings, you can see that their fins all run up and down, not sideways.

edit: looks something like this

http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/pro...779158&ccitem=

[krazy]

That's most likely the meat of a baseboard-style heater (the radiator type, not the electric variety). I have a pair of them that are about six feet long in my basement plumbed into a boiler/heat exchanger project.

I don't know where to go about getting them as the two I have were in my uncle's garage and acquired for free.

I would definitely mount the unit so that air can rise convectively through the fins. Mounting it with the pipe running vertically would be counterproductive.

How far is it from the area you want to mount this thing to the level of the top of your computer? If it's going to work very well, it should be within a few feet ideally.

[FizzledFiend]

actuall location or length of plumbing? it will be apprax. 3 feet from PC but about 5 foot of tubing to and from..thats the kinds of things I am wondering about

[xerka]

Yeah, those are defiantly for houses with water heaters. Just pulled of the covering of one at my house and looks the exact same. They do do a great job of spreading heat with out much air circulation. I would assume they would be great for what you are looking to do. There was article on overlcockers.com where a guy used a lot of copper tubing for his completely passive radiator, though I can't find it now....man I really hate trying to find old articles on overclockers.

[bobkoure]

Slantfin baseboard - used to transfer heat from "forced hot water" systems to to room air.
One contractor provides a rating table. I believe they are assuming that room air is 72F. Multiply by .29 to get from BTU/hr to W/hr. I also believe the ratings are per "foot of finning".
Remember that the lowest temp-differential on the chart is 38C - and we're working with something around 5C (or around 13% of the lowest rating). The relationship between differential and efficiency is not linear, but I'd start out guessing around 10% of rated capacity or 9 or 10 W/foot.

...just thinking out loud...

[bigben2k]

I wouldn't hold much hope for it, unfortunately.

If ya'll go over Bill's radiator roundup, you can compare this unit to a U tube tranny cooler, type of unit.

Note that the exception in this configuration is the Hayden tranny cooler, because it has built-in turbulators, making it exceptionally efficient. I don't believe that the additional size is going to have a significant impact here.

[Jabo]

xerka-> I did this rad Click on Medusa link in my sig to see it.

FizzledFiend -> I'd reccomend you to dig a hole under your house and burry this rad in the ground. In this way you are going to get low, constant water temps year round. The deeper you dig it in the better