My Experience with Rit Whitener/Brightener - Don't Use /w Storm CPU Block

Short story: Don’t use Rit Whitener and Brightener with a restrictive block like a Storm. It will crystallize together in the jets and clog the block. There was nothing in my Maze4 at all so a non-restrictive block should be fine. There were no particles that I could see in the fluid that I drained from my loop which leads me to believe that the clumped particles only form in the block itself and don’t circulate in the loop.

Long tory:
I added Rit Whitener and Brightener for the UV glow to my loop about 5-6 months back. I crushed it up into powder and disolved it into hot distilled water. My cooling setup consists of a Maze4 GPU block, Storm Rev2 CPU block, Stealth 240 Radiator, D5 pump, and Alphacool reservoir with distilled water, Pentosin, and some povidone iodine. A couple of months ago I started noticing the water in my reservoir wasn’t swishing around with nearly as much force as it did before. Another member on the board here posted about his experience with a restrictive block (I don’t remember which one) and another type of UV dye and how the dye clogged his block.

Anyway since I’m lazy, I kept putting off tearing down everything and opening up the blocks and reseating everything (which would require motherboard removal for the Storm), but last night I went ahead and took care of business. I figured that I waited long enough and temperatures were rising! I drained the loop and unhooked everything. When I took apart my Storm block it was just as I suspected. Rit had crystallized in the jets and clocked them all up I smacked the impingement plate against my sink and knocked a bunch of the crap out. I then took an appropriately sized sewing needle and slid it into every hole to make sure the jets were unclogged. My Maze 4 block was fine with nothing in it. Nothing was discolored, except for my Tygon tubing which as cloudy. I’m not sure if it was the Pentosin or Rit that did that.

I put everything back together (such a chore) and hooked everything back up. I primed the pump and turned on the PSU and the water shot on through with much force. I continued to fill it and prime it until it was full. I powered up my computer (yeah I didn’t leak test). The fluid was flowing like a raging river again! BIOS temperature gauge registered 21°C on the CPU (much much cooler than it had been reading in MBM5 in Windows) so it’s good to go. I know the sensor registers a few degrees cooler than it should be since sometimes it has reported dropping below room temperature, but it was “normal” compared to how it was when I first setup my loop.

I'm glad you shared this because I was very skeptical when you I read you mention several times that you were using this stuff. I still recommend if you are going to use dye, use dye that you get from a good watercooling vendor that is going to be water soluble.

Yeah I am happy to admit that it was a mistake to use it in my system. You might be ok using it without a non restrictive block since the only place there was any build up was in the tiny jets/tubes inside the storm block. The Maze4 block looked almost brand new. The pump still seems to work perfectly fine and never made any noise. It just has a nice steady hum. I do think I'm going to replace the tubing just for aesthetic reasons.

I might try another UV dye in the future, but for now, I'm just glad to have it back to normal. I really should have taken care of the problem sooner though. I'd also like to get a DDC+ with petra top and Thermochill rad in the future but I don't know if the small gains will be worth the cost.

I'll stand by what I've always said - all dyes start life as a powder, and no matter what you do, given time will return to a powder, thus leaving residue on system internals and potentially causing clogging problems.

The only variable from dye to dye is the AMOUNT of time it takes...