Water cooling and pump failure?

I always wondered why water colling parts company's such as dangerden and d-tek never offered any kind of product that could shut your system down if your pump ever failed? I really don't want to put my pc's life on the line with MBM5 lol, Don't get me wrong its a good program and i use it now , but only because I have no other choice. I thought about emailing them does any one think they would listen? The way I see it they would sell more products if people where not so afaid to trust $1000's of dollars in hardware to a $25-60 pump. I love watercooling and I have done it for a few years now and never really had any problems except loosing a ti4200 to a leak, but I would be more then willing to pay $100 for melt down protection lol. I am kinda just ranting here but I wanna know if any one else thinks this is a good idea?

well most mobo now have a thermal shutdown, it would just be a redundant system, which isn't a bad thing. But not needed

Motherboard temperature shutdown settings are normally to restrictive having to high lowest settings. My pc would have locked up long before it got to shutdown temps. Of course you can use the shutdown incorporated in win xp with a set temp in motherboard monitor to do the same. It's still a passive protection system and I personally prefer an active system that responds instantly to loss of flow.

I'm still using the in built OS shutdown at the moment with a flow switch, but will be replacing with a hardware shutoff soon, as I'll be using a tec. It's essential to have an instant flow related shutoff when using high watt tecs.

have a read of these.

Water Cooling Flow Protection

Water pump failure !!!, Total disaster !!

It would be nice.

The hydrocool 200 system has that feature. It shuts the system down with high temp and I think with low water also.

When I first set up my watercooling I used the system for a few days before putting in a pump relay. One time my girlfriend turned on the computer without turning on the pump first. Fortunately I had set the bios to shut down if the cpu got too hot and it worked just fine.

I have the asus a78nx, and it has the thermal overload protection.

It has the capibility that you can set the "safety" temp at which it imediatly powers down the comp.

You could get a Digital Doc 5, and put a thermister on every component. You can set a different shutdown temp for each component using the DD5, and have each of the "fan controls" wired into a relay that would cut power when activated.

Simply having the pump die in a water cooled system is not likely to cause component death: modern mobo shutdown features SHOULD be sufficient to turn it off before fatal temps are reached. In fact, it will probably take longer for temps to rise that if you were air-cooled and had the cpu fan die, thanks to the water in the block and tubing.

However- having a tube blow out (unlikely) or come off (less unlikely) would be more of a problem: many water blocks do not have much mass to absorb the heat and allow a relatively "graceful" shutdown.

None of the above may be sufficient if you have massively over-volted your cpu, of course!

Apps like ShutDownNow can help tremendously, but if you really wish to go the hardware route there are a number of ways to go about it: a flow switch seems the most logical way to me, although I have never bothered.

I think the reason there are no commercial devices available is due to the alternatives already available that work pretty well, and the fact that while growing, water cooling is still a small market of mostly people that have the ability to find and create any device they need: I know that I would pay maybe $10 for one to try out, but no more than that. Until I had tested it thoroughly I would only get one and leave the other three rigs running as they are.

rogerdugans

In most situations I'd agree, but you are still waiting for a secondary undesirable side effect to happen before the system reacts and shuts down.

Part of the reason I made my flow switch shut down system was that in reconfiguring the system I'd forgotten to plug the pump in.

It sounds a silly error but is so easy to do when you have your mind on other things if you continually change and expand your W/C system.

I did have the bios set to shut off at 50c (its lowest setting), but the CPU normally runs at 25C to 28C in my set-up with ground cooling. I came back to it to find a blank screen but PC still on. immediately checked for any leaks......there were none. I tried rebooting a few times before I touched the cpu block and realised my error & plugged the pump in.

My point is the CPU locked up due to the heat up before it got to the bios temp setting so never shut off. This would most likely lead to a disaster if I hadn't found my error when I did.

I have since built a system, (linked previously), that incorporates a pump relay and a system that prevents the PC booting unless the pump, (and only the pump), is plugged in. It also has a flow switch that reacts instantly to a no, or very low flow situation. All of the mods mentioned cost about the same price as a current top PC game title in total......... cheap insurance to my mind.

It may be overkill to some but I'm much happier leaving the PC unattended during the day now. I think its also pretty critical to have a true instant hardware shut off when using a high watt TEC, as they can very quickly get to solder melting temps if the flow stops!! (see my other link)

Maybe this Dec. 9th 2003 article by "RoboTech" from the Overclockers.com front page will help.


"Controlling Pumps and Initiating Emergency Shutdowns"

Hi, in Italy we have built a system that shout down the system when the Temperature of waterblock is too hot. The system is composed by a pass troghout connection on power swicth and a lm35 sensor applied on the waterblock.
a italian link of this product...
http://www.insanewb.com/waterblock/guarda_wb.asp?waterblock=34
i'm sorry is only in italian...but i can translate some parts.
There is a swicth to set shutdown temperature fron 35 to 70 degress with 5° step.