Seufari said:
Please tell me how exactly it is better at filling the system.
Thanks!
I'll take a shot at this, but keep in mind I'm no scientist...
Just for the sake of illustration, say your pump is pushing one gallon per minute of water at all times.
When that water passes through a smaller diameter tube, it's velocity must increase to get the same one gallon per minute through.
It's velocity slows when it passes through a larger section of tubing (or a chamber such as a reservior), again because you're pushing one gallon per minute.
In a reservior, the decrease in velocity makes it easy for a bubbles' boyancy to overcome the water's velocity and float to the surface, never to enter the waterstream again.
Also, in a system that doesn't yet have the pump running, a bubble can actually "clog" the tubing, keeping water from filling the system, so you need to run the pump for a short time to move the "clog" (as long as you DO have water in the pump!!!).
A reservior usually holds enough water to fill the system in one shot, so you can (depending on res size), just cycle the pump once and it's done after a little top-off.
A T-line system's piece of tubing doesn't hold enough water to fill the entire system in one go, so you need to fill-cycle-fill-cycle-fill...etc.
Once it's running, the res has the water capacity to make up for bubbles that continue to come out without worry. A T-line still needs to be checked and refilled often.
Lastly, since there's air bubbles at the microscopic level in most water, and many trapped inside of the radiator, there will be bubbles working out of the system for weeks, and a reservior doesn't have any problem with keeping up. Alot of first time T-line users post here panicked that their level drops so much over time they're afraid they have leaks they aren't seeing.
Res user's levels don't drop so drastically, so we don't often get one panicking until their video starts getting artifacts
.
I've run T-lines, and I've run reserviors. I prefer reserviors because of their fill-n-go abilities.
My cases are huge, and I don't LAN, so there's no portability/size/weight issues here.
BTW, technicaly, a T-line
is a reservior, only it has a small orifice and air surface area, and a small ammount of make-up water.
The fittings themselves often have an inside diameter smaller than the tubing, so water velocity is actually increased as it travels through it. This equals more time spent bleeding out the air. The tiniest bubbles must join other bubbles (which they eventually will) to gain enough boyancy to escape through the T.