Watercooling and maintenance- What do you think?

I see mentioned on a semi-regular basis that people complain that a watercooled system is too much to maintain. I am curious what other people's thoughts are on this.

I watercooled two computers for a friend of mine last year. Both are cooled passively by a car radiator. He is the type that thinks that his machines should just run no matter how much he abuses and non-maintains them. I set him up with eheim 1250s, swiftech cpu blocks, and a pvc tube res on both. I did this last summer around June. I took him to watercooling for silence, and he loves that. I also felt I could get his computers to run more reliably on water since he never blows out the dust.

I just went over his place this weekend and flushed/refilled everything. As I expected, he has done absolutely nothing to them for maintenance. I had to take them outside and blow clouds of dust out of them and then flush/refill them. I put about 20% antifreeze with algaecide and iodine in the loop. There was ZERO growth or corrosion after 10 months of use.

If these systems were on air, they would have clogged up with dust and overheated long ago. I find that with air cooling, I have to blow the dust out about every two weeks to keep things from getting clogged up. With watercooling (passive car rad), I can go like 2 months before having to blow dust out of the case fans. And as for changing fluid, I don't go more than about every six months to be on the safe side, but like I said, we went 10 months on his with no problem.

Do you think watercooling requires more maintenance than aircooling? Do you think watercooling requires more frequent maintenance, or is the maintenance harder to do than air? Which one do you think is harder to upkeep?

With my system, it's kindof iritating that it doesn't require maintenance.
Watercooling's my hobby, I don't even overclock even though my stuff would be good for it.

Sometimes I'll swap out waterblocks to old ones just for something to do. I don't loose coolant with my build by changing blocks, so I don't even get to change fluids.
The air is all filtered so there's no dust to get after.

I might build a new case or something, 'cause it's just boring that it always runs.

I really don't have much maintenance to do. I don't know what I'd really have to maintain. Water level maybe? Thats easy enough to do and I only have to do anything every few months at best. Thats the only extra thing I have to do. Cleaning out my heater core is easier than cleaning a densely finned heatsink. A shot of compressed air is all it needs and it leaves the case because my HC is flush to the case as opposed to a heatsink which is mounted to the motherboard and would leave dust all over my case. The only real disadvantage is the amount of space taken up by my WC system. Mid tower cases are not designed for this lol.

well i can beleive u can go up to a year with out doing any maintenance . esp if all the rigging was done propper and the puter was out of the sunshine . also not using any transparent tubeing to culture any algae . and kudo's to ur coolant mix .

i was unfortunate to have transparent uv tubing and a large side window pointing to the sun ^_^ . how delightful >_<