Building a Water Chiller?

WOW! How did you get that soldered back together without leaking? I don't even see a seam?!?!?!?

He did it carefully!

If you do not want to insulate everything you can use the peltier controllers that I'm using in my chiller. It allows you to adjust the peltier's output, once set it automatically keeps the water at a given temperature.
wj

wym, I've seen your setup and it is awesome. How much for the pelt controllers and where can I get them? That is really the only problem I have is that sometimes the water gets colder than I really want it. Only way I can control it is to turn off a pelt.

dave, you have to look pretty close to see the seam. I tinned the entire surface with solder, then used a couple hundred pounds of pressure, clamping the top on, before reheating and final soldering. These things will never leak, believe me. I pressure test them with 100+ PSI of air before I use them.

jimsakajstic,
I'll keep the conversation here.
I soldered one of my blocks together just like you show and had a real problem. I had what appears to be the same build of solder on the body side (just like you have) and I tinned the top. Then I clamped them and heated. The problem was that with the body horizontal to the table and with the cap on top when everything started to flow......well it really flowed and ended up into the channels. I knew that it should have been less restrictive so I heated it up and pulled it apart (what a mess). Sure enough a couple of the channels were partially filled with solder (where the channels made the turn around). Just something to think about. Pretty sure than tinned channels don't conduct heat as well either.
I experienced the same ‘disable a pelt’ syndrome when I had a sudden temp change. The pelt controller has made life a lot more fun. I even use the idle switch sometimes and don’t worry about puddles of water forming. With idle enabled I find that my 156 never comes into play and the 71 cycles on and off around 50%. As soon as I start to do something the 71 is running full blast and the 156 starts cycling depending on the amount of work. If you get one make sure it has the dual thermistors, that way you can use one to measure the water temp and the other one can be placed either in ambient room air or the case air…without worrying about where you place the controller itself.
I am blown away that you built those with the tools you described, mucho time was invested!
wj

thanks bud for the info.

Just to be a bit more detailed about the soldering. "Tinned" was maybe not the best description of how I did it. In the picture that is shown above, you can see quite a bit of solder, actually too much. I am estimating there is more than 1/16" thick solder there. What I did at that point was to put it on the beltsander,(the soldered side) which took it down a bit and also made everything nice and flat so that when I reheated, I had no high spots. I just brushed some flux on top of the solder after I beltsanded, clamped it nice and tight as I mentioned and reheated with torch. And yes, I'm almost embarrassed to admit how much time it took. You'v done this stuff so you surely know.

Using the two holes at the ends, I could look down the channels and see that no solder had oozed into the channels. Of course the center channels I could not see, but based on the flow and what I could see, I am pretty sure that they are also unrestricted.

And I thought I was the only one crazy enough to do this stuff!

Nice chatting with ya bud, happy coolin. Again, thanx for the info on the pelt. controllers.

Okay, one last question: If I was to make blocks like the above except in aluminum, would preformance be lessened quite a bit ... and would it be worth it to use copper if I could get it?

Thanks, I really find this thread interesting.

Eddie, I don't think you would lose too much performance with aluminum. I would still recommend copper though, heat transfer properties are better.

One reason I did not use aluminum was because of my design. I would have had to use some sort of a gasket in between the main body and the top, as you cannot solder aluminum. I don't have access to a TIG welder either.

Aluminum will be cheaper and is definitely easier to mill. But if you have a local metal recycling center or scrapyard in your area, you might be able to get some very cheap copper. My copper for all the blocks pictured, plus a few waterblocks I made was less than $15.

If you decide to make some blocks, I'd be happy to help if you have any questions. Good luck and have fun.

I agree that aluminum would/should work just fine.
I have a suggestion.
check out this site .
I do not like the apparant lack of andodizing on the inside of thiese blocks but this same company used to have slot A blocks that were anodized and they would work great with two pelts.
Also, unless you have an extreme love of carving these things from a block......spend the $ and get the above types block or similar.
wj

Thnk a a beter aproch is to put 3 blocks the two outer blocks are for the hot side of the pelt. the one in middel will be fo cold side. In this way the heat can be taken out of the pelt easyer.
rember the tec will genarate 2x cpu heat.

ok, game over man, game over............
Carther looks like hes making a pelt block.
check out his new post in watercooling.

Also I read an article about lapping.
Do you think I would see a temp drop with lapping and a pelt WB?

So lclark2074, are you saying the two waterblocks that would be cooling the cold block should be sun on seperate loops from each other or just run in paralell?

davekusa said:

what would happen if you reversed the power on a pelt water block and tried to make that a water chiller.
Do you think the hot side could be dissipated with a heatsink and fan? wonder how it would work?

Click to expand...

i am not sure you can just reverse the power on a pelt and run it. if you plug the power of a fan into the ground and the ground of a fan into the power it will not run backwards - it will not run at all. you could however simply flip the pelt around on the block so its cold side was facing the wb.

air cooling a pelt would be a bad idea. if you are thinking about subambient cpu temps, it is a ridiculous idea. if you follow my link wymjym has done what you discussed but with another waterloop cooling the hotside of the pelt.

EdDiE_20o3 said:

Okay, one last question: If I was to make blocks like the above except in aluminum, would preformance be lessened quite a bit ... and would it be worth it to use copper if I could get it?

Thanks, I really find this thread interesting.

Click to expand...

copper. if you are dealing with pelts and a setup like this then you do not want to skimp and cheat yourself by using aluminum when copper is not very much more expensive. you will get worse results with aluminum, how much worse is hard to say, but the difference would be noticeable.

Okay, then copper it is!

Uh ... also, for the peltiers ... I would like sub-zero temperatures so should I have a 226W peltier on the CPU and a 226W chilling the water or two lesser wattage peltiers for the water?

I also have to think of how I'm going to cool the water in the hot loop. Would one or two Black Ice Extremes work ... I don't really want to go with a heatercore because I already have one BIE ...

using a pelt on the cpu as well as having a pelt chiller may not produce the results you are looking for. the amount of heat in the cpu cooling loop would be substantial with the cpu+pelt heat; you would need a peltier which is stronger than 226 watts to transfer all of the heat from the cpu cooling loop effectively. the general rule I hear mentioned often is that you want the wattage of your tec to be atleast twice the heat output of the heat source. Two lesser wattage peltiers are definetly a no go.

One good heat exchanger in the chiller loop should work, after all that is what wymjym used. if you had two heat exchangers you might find that you can run with quieter fans and get the same temps as with one heat exchanger and louder fans.

Then what about a 226W pelt on the CPU and two 226W pelts chilling the water?

LoLZ ... okay, now how do I power it all!

But just say I did that ... what tems do you thing I would get ... like -20? ... or lower?

BTW, Thanks for the help!

EdDiE_20o3 said:

So lclark2074, are you saying the two waterblocks that would be cooling the cold block should be sun on seperate loops from each other or just run in paralell?

Click to expand...

YES all 3 loops in paralell/
Separate pumps blocks resovsr and condenser
I once thought of making a system of 4+4 Tec’s for a primary cooler +1 Tec for CPU+1 Tec for GPU
That 10 Tec’s
I got as far as figuring the flow rate and design the blocks

Has any one blue printed these blocks?

I was thinking this would work good [ someone posted it before but I forgot who ... ] WaterBlock!

And how would 2 x 226W peltiers work to chill the water? and maybe a 226W peltier on the CPU?


*sigh* maybe I would have been better off with Phase-Change!