Make sure your pump comes on if the power goes out 0_o

I was at work and the power went out for some reason - long enough that my UPS ran out of juice and shut down. It's a server, so in the past (pre-watercooled) I set the BIOS to boot up when power resumes. I forgot about this when I set it up with watercooling.

The problem arose when the system powered back up after the USP came back on, because the pump didn't turn over and sat there overheating, and therefore so did the CPU. Thank god I have a T-line, because a closed system would have blown it's top. Since the system wasn't sealed (just a loose rubber cap over the top of the T), it boiled over onto the bottom of the case. It actually managed to miss EVERYTHING on the way down, except a fan mounted on the bottom to cool the hard drives. No damage there. I didn't notice when I got home for lunch, but did notice nothing was onscreen for the machine despite the fact that it appeared to be running. I booted it up and got into windows when MBM went nuts with a warning of 91C on the CPU! CRAP! So I shut it down asap and looked in the case and realized what had happened.

To boil water with antifreeze, the CPU had to reach at least 100C, and probably higher. The tubing is white near the core from heat damage as well. But guess what, I took a heatsink out of the closet to assess the damage after I cleaned everything up, and the CPU lives! In fact, the system appears to have no damage whatsoever. Talk about some serious luck

So if your duron 1300 is not overclocked and it overheats, expect it to be able to withstand 100C . This one took it for around 30 minutes or more!

You should set BIOS or a program like MBM5 to shutdown the system at a certain temperature. I've set both BIOS monitoring and MBM5 @65C to be on the safe side!

Smoking will takes years off your life!! um, i wonder what smoking will do to your cpu's life span..

dang, what kinda cpu it running? a pally?

Ouch, that is cutting it close.


I was worried that a familly member might actually turn on my system without making sure my AC pump (Hydor L35) was on so I setup my system using a power strip/surge suppressor so that in order for any power to get to the computer the pump must be running. Yep, its an additional drain on my UPS so I ended up getting a larger one and I will still run into problems with short UPS life in case of a power outtage....but the idea of deep fried processors was enough to make me do it

Xenocide said:

dang, what kinda cpu it running? a pally?

Click to expand...

Yeah it's a pally-based duron (morgan core). Crazy huh? I thought for sure that thing was dead, but it had booted into windows beforehand at 91C and rising, so I figured I'd give it a try anyways with a heatsink.

Here is a pic of it beforehand. I'll upload the other ones after work.

Man, that is lucky! (lucky it survived so far). Ju need an APC for your pump!

I had to put a flow meter on my setup, so the Mrs. wouldn't restart my computer for me without the water running...it happened once, luckily it was only 20 minutes before I got home to rescue it.

Seems that everybody is doing simple ways to keep the pump running. What is this I hear about moding the PSU to turn on the pump when the system turns on?

You can search "relay" for that info. It's not necessarily a psu mod, but it's using a relay that switches on the pump's power when the psu powers up.
It wouldn't have helped him much though, his pump had power but didn't spin up like it's supposed to.

Which is why I chose a motherboard w/ tempature alarms/shutdowns. And my dad called it an "extra feature" try NEEDED feature.

Relays. Are. Awesome.
I got one with my L30, thanks to a great member here, it's really useful.
oh yeah, i want to see the destruction!!

*cough*12v pumps*cough* ahem.

I'm curious, what prevented the pump from spinning up? If the pump didn't get full power from the socket, doesn't that mean the UPS didn't, either? I guess I don't understand, since brown/blackouts in my area are followed by full power within a fraction of a second of service resuming. Does the pump have some sort of momentary on switch to turn them on? Because I thought they were setup to be constantly on when fed power.

Anyways, it was only an old duron. You're lucky you didn't 'stress' test your XP-M in the same way...

All I have heard about 12v pumps is, "they are crap, don't use them" "they are loud and noisy"...

Thats good that the cpu lived! How much water was left when you got there? Oh, and what is the telephone wire for in your pic?

The pump came on alright, but it didn't spin up. Some pumps have dead areas in the magnetic field that allow the internal magnet to line up and lock up if it happens to be resting in that position when it comes on. That's what happened to me.

That phone line was my ghetto way of hooking up that fan on the UPS to the computer's power source. I know I could have hooked it up to a battery in the UPS and kept it all internal to it, but I was being lazy at the time. I'll post a pic later of the water boiled out. I got busy in a game last night and forgot to post it. I'm at work now so it'll have to wait till tonight

Either way, I promised my clan I won't be using water anymore for the server!

What kind of pump do you have? Did it have some kind of impeller mod? I find the magnetic "dead zone" theory hard to believe but I'm willing to be educated.

I do believe that some lower powered pumps intentionally have the impeller designed so it'll easily rotate part of the way around the shaft. This serves 2 purposes. The first is it helps keep a small obstruction from jamming in the pump; think of the debris possibilities in an aquarium. The second is that when turned on it allows the shaft to start rotating a quarter-turn or so without the full water load of the impeller. In other words, the start-up torque of the motor is less than when it's turning full speed.

I don't understand why you don't have some sort of over-tempshutdown ebabled