Rubbing Alcohol in bong?

Can anyone come up with any negatives to me putting perhaps a pen cap full of rubbing alcohol per half gallon of tap water in my system?

A friend (pwnt by pat actually), told me that the bacteria that will eventually grow in here, when evaporated (I'm using a bong), will become airborne, and that I DO NOT want to inhale them into my lungs.

Seeing as how rubbing alcohol is a disinfectant, and I dont want to gag myself on bleach, is this okay?

Thanks,
Banshee


P.S. My bong is keeping my P4 3.0C @ 4.0 Ghz cool at 38c idle/45c load, and only evaporates 8 oz of water a day! Take THAT gallon-a-day bongs!

The rubbing alcohol will prolly also evaporate and end up in your lungs which cant be good. Try and find a biostat that is humidifior (sp) safe.

I am very new to water cooling, but distilled or de-ionised water is better in water cooling setups, as it doesn’t have the dissolved minerals and other chemicals present in tap water, that will damage/build-up on your waterblocks.

As MrBrian said, rubbing alcohol, as it has a lower boiling point than water, will evaporate first. I don’t think that the sort of amounts you are talking about would be harmful though.

Eagle, you're right about distilled/de-inoized being better. The problem is that in a bong water evaporates. So topping it off daily with the treated waters gets costly.

Do like MrBrian said. Just make sure you get the right bacteriostat.

I thought with a bong setup the physical bong is closed to the outside air, and the water vapor cools as it goes down the sealed "bong", which is then collected and sent back into the computer.

Bacteriostat is the way to go. Look for Evaporative Humidifier Bacteriostat. I used similar stuff from sears in my evap setups. I never had a problem with growth in 2 different setups. Minerals from hard tap water really caked up though

no, the heat needs to go somewhere. if you had a big enough setup, im sure you could recover some of the evaporated water, but it really isnt worth it. and using de-ionized water is bad for your water cooling system. it seems that distilled water is a good balance between corrosiveness, and scale build-up and such. but tap water will work fine anyway.

ggo said:

de-ionized water is bad for your water cooling system. it seems that distilled water is a good balance between corrosiveness

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Distilled water and de-ionised water is essentially the same thing made by different processes. Distilled water is separated from impurities by evaporation and condensing, de-ionised water is ‘made pure’ by electrical removal of ions. De-ionised water can cause problems as it will try to regain its saturation of ions by dissolving the softest metal in your water cooling rig, this can be stopped by adding Antifreeze or another additive to replace the ions.

I will try the bacteria stuff.

Banshee

yes i realize that they are essentially the same, except like i said, de-ionized water will cause corrosion at a much greater rate than distilled water initially. that is really the only practical difference between de-ionized and distilled water.