drinking fountain

[Niatross]

I have a chance to get hold of a drinking fountain for free. It cools the water by soldering the coiled copper water line to the coiled copper evaporator line. The one problem I forsee is that the drinking fountain cycles when it's doing what it was originally designed to do, (provide a short drink of water) so that you get a shot of cold water when you get a drink and then it kicks on when it needs to cool the fresh incoming water. Now in it's proposed new job it will have a fresh supply of warm water from the computer which I assume will prevent it from ever kicking off.

I was wondering if anyone had any experiance with a drinking fountains ability to withstand this abuse of constant running

And if it would be better to pass the Computers water through the fountains original water line or let the evaporator chill a res and pass my computers water through the res via a separate rad or copper coil.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree here and just forget the whole thing?

[Tuff]

Continue to use a Rad and the waterchiller while using a large resovior. You should be able to store enough chilled water to stay somewhat ahead of the heat.

Tuff

[jaydee]

Well if it is for free then who cares if it fails after some time. Just turn on the thermal protection in the bios and or software and do it! I would run the water through the existing tubing and run it into a res, then a seprate loop using the chilled water from the res to go through the computer system. Maybe even put a rad before it goes back into the res to keep the fountain working effeciently as the water would be cooler before it had to chill it.

[Niatross]

Well it seems that using the fountains original water line to pass the computers water through is a no go. I turned the drinking fountain on at my place of employment( It's similar to the one I'd be using ) and after about 10 seconds the compressor kicked on, but after about 30 seconds the coil in it ran out of prechilled water and the water that came out was only slightly cooler than tap water. This is while the compressor continued to run. This suggests that the transfer of heat across the two soldered copper coils is not fast enough to handle the load. It seems that a drinking fountain is designed to not worry about the speed of the heat transfer because for the most part it has plenty of time between individual drinks to prechill water. Looking at the two separate coils there is not a lot of direct conact between the two. It appears to be soldered only at the beginning and the end, just enough to keep them reasonbly together

This leaves the res idea as the only option it seems to me. It seems that the compressor coil gets very cold ( frost forms on it ) when I screwed with the thermostat enough to get it to run long enough. I would think that with water surrounding the coils in a res configuration that the tranfer of heat would be much better.

I have a submursable pump just laying around and was wondering if putting it in the bottom of the res just to keep the water moving would help transfer heat out of the rad and into the compressor coil. Seems logical anyway.

Any comments good or bad would be welcomed

[jaydee]

I say give it a shot and see what happens. Sorry I don't have anything better to add. Sounds like a good project though.

[Niatross]

I've went and screwed things up royally now. I broke the probe/thermocouple thing off of the thermostat. Anyone know what I can use to cycle this thing

[Tuff]

Just hardwire a thermostat inplace of it

Tuff

[Niatross]

Can you give me some kind of idea on what kind of thermostat and where i might find one?

[Tuff]

Your local hardware store should carry what you need. Home Depot...or maybe even Walmart.

Tuff