plan for fridge cooling - please critique

Just had an idea.

It might be good for someone like a student who only uses their computer at max capacity for a few hours each day.

I did a little maths (oh, my head, my head, can't stand the pain ) and this is what I got.

Say he's a good student who goes to lectures and practicals. He also sleeps a little bit. This should leave a max of 1/3 of the day that he needs to use his computer intensively.

A fridge would normally not be good enough for this application, but my idea basically rests on how water has a large thermal capacity, and if he has enough water/antifreeze cooled in the freeze compartment, there's enough thermal capacity for the coolant not to rise too much in temperature. For the other 2/3 of the day he idles the processor or turns off the computer, giving the fridge time to cool the coolant down again.

An example:

with 50 litres of coolant in the freezer, the student waits a few days for the temperature to reach -20 C or so.

this coolant is then used to cool his computer. if there's 100w of heat, the coolant temperature rises less than 2 (should be 1.7) degrees C per hour asuming no cooling from the fridge. Add in cooling from fridge, and the temperature rise might be just 1.5 degrees C per hour. So, 8 hours later at 100w, the coolant should still be below 0 degrees C.

then for the next 16 hours, the fridge cools the coolant back down to -20 degrees, assuming it can remove heat at a speed of 50w.

Of course this would not work 24/24, but it's not meant to. For student overclockers this might be quite a cost effective way to have very good cooling for their computer and food.

So, what do you think? I'll never try this of course, as I have a prommy and so has no need, but it might be interesting for all student overclockers out there who can find cheap fridges.

Hmmm, not that I'm going to do anything like this, but I do have an extra half size fridge here. I wonder how I can do something with this yet still have air cooling in my case. Anyway, don't mean to hijack your thread.

Not hijacking at all, thanks for the input.

Well, I guess there's still air cooling for NB, AGP card and PSU.

Edit:

sorry, just saw your thread. I misunderstood. hmmm. got to think about your question a bit harder.

shiyan said:

Not hijacking at all, thanks for the input.

Well, I guess there's still air cooling for NB, AGP card and PSU.

Click to expand...

I meant I don't have water cooling or anything like that. I'd have to simply pipe in cold air somehow. I made a separate thread about it. Thanks for giving me the idea.

I didn't see your thread when I made mine. Sorry about that.

But I had an idea. Basically you'd need to use cloth or something to make an adapters from a very thin long opening to a fan sized opening.

Ah, you might need to make two actually.

I made my thread after yours. You got me thinking.

Your idea would probably work however I personally dont like the idea of being limited like that.. I would need a MORE active cooling sytem personally, and besides, then you couldnt fold for [OC]FoldingNinja's (like you SHOULD be doing

CrashOveride said:

Your idea would probably work however I personally dont like the idea of being limited like that.. I would need a MORE active cooling sytem personally, and besides, then you couldnt fold for [OC]FoldingNinja's (like you SHOULD be doing

Click to expand...

that's definitely true.

but then cheapa** students will be cheapa** students.

That is a pretty clever idea. What I would want to do though is to fill up my entire chest freezer that is about 6ft wide and 3ft deep with antifreeze/water and then use that to cool my CPU.

Thank You,
Daniel

arabarabian said:

That is a pretty clever idea. What I would want to do though is to fill up my entire chest freezer that is about 6ft wide and 3ft deep with antifreeze/water and then use that to cool my CPU.

Thank You,
Daniel

Click to expand...

You might want to make sure it can support that much weight... But it would make good in cunjunction with a rad for normal use... maybe as a big res, unless its too weak.

wo! assuming that thing is 3 feet high, you can have as much as 1400 litres of coolant (might be expensive, don't know about how much antifreeze costs)

in that case, assuming no cooling for all that coolant, 100w heat load for 8 hours would raise the temperature of the coolant by a whopping 0.5 degree!

(100w x 3600s x 8) / (1400000g x 4.18J/K)

but even with like 200litres, the temperature rise is not much, just 3.5 degrees.
(100w x 3600s x 8) / (200000g x 4.18J/K)

edit:

you'll probably need to wait quite a long time before all that coolant gets chilled down though.

shiyan said:

wo! assuming that thing is 3 feet high, you can have as much as 1400 litres of coolant (might be expensive, don't know about how much antifreeze costs)

in that case, assuming no cooling for all that coolant, 100w heat load for 8 hours would raise the temperature of the coolant by a whopping 0.5 degree!

(100w x 3600s x 8) / (1400000g x 4.18J/K)

but even with like 200litres, the temperature rise is not much, just 3.5 degrees.
(100w x 3600s x 8) / (200000g x 4.18J/K)

Click to expand...

You could just tunr off you computer every couple days over night and let it catch back up...