Water Tower have a few MAJOR flaws

I have been using my water tower for some time now.....
Worked great at 1st... slowly got worse. Let me tell how.
They have a few Major Flaws
This is because water towers are
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- OPEN SYSTEMS

-I have to add water all the time. This makes them a chore to look after (not really but i can not be away from my computer for more than a few days...)

-You cannot add any chemicals to the system to make it cool even better (sure they get your temps under ambient...) as you don’t want to be breathing chemicals.

-Dirt gets into the system in the form of dust. This is bad. The fan that blows air into the tower also blows in dust... this gets into the water.. and into the tubs, and slowly starts to restrict water flow, AKA coolant.
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-CLOSE THE SYSTEM

So i purpose to make the water tower a closed system.
But a closed system would lose the entire effect of the water tower as it is based on evaporation. If you don’t let the water evaporate.....
No cooling, the water will continue to rise in temp until the CPU fries.
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-THE PLAN

How do I plan to do this then?
Ensure everything is sealed.
their are two possible places in a water tower cooler for the system to be open (providing you don’t have any leeks)
1st being the reservoir
2nd the water tower.

The reservoir is the easy thing to ensure is closed. So details are not needed.

The tower on the other hand presents a few challenges
Air must be able to be drawn into the water tower's base and exit the top, then be recycled so that is once again drawn into the base.

The evaporated water must be collected, allowed to condense and be re-entered into the system.
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-MAKING IT WORK

The first issue I am going to deal with is loss of water.
The top of the water tower will be fitted with a very fine mesh. This will keep small water droplets in that the fan is blowing out.
And on top of that is a chamber that will allow the water to condense. When the water forms large enough droplets they will fall into another container. That will act as a small reservoir. Once this reservoir fills slightly the collected water will drip back into the system (all theory right now... few plans/ideas to try) No air will be able to escape for the chambers.

Air will have to be channelled back down to the fan at the base of the tower. This will be done by a tube of some sort in one of the chambers that only lets air through. This tub will go along side the tower back to the fan. All air will be recycled.
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-WILL IT WORK?/IS IT WORTH IT?

Only temps will tell. This will no longer be an evaporator once it is finished.. but rather a hybrid evaporator-radiator as the water condensing in the chambers will lose heat from radiation. It sounds good to me. But... only temps will tell.

If it no longer brings my CPU to under ambient temps when i am not under load... then it doesn’t work as well as a normal evaporator and it would be alot simpler to use a radiator to rid heat from your water-cooling system. Temps shouldn’t go lower than before... well until i add chemicals; they the really scary cooling takes place... I hope

Everyone seems to be concerned with frying their CPU because the water gets too hot or the water never reached or stopped going to the waterblock. Does no one take advantage of CPU Shutoff Temps in the BIOS anymore? The lowest setting in my BIOS is 170 degrees Farenheit, 76 degrees Celsius, I have it set to that. So once it reaches 76 degrees C, it starts to shut down, which takes about 1 minute max on my system. Seeing as AMD says about the max for T-birds is 90 degrees C, I doubt that my T-bird would fry.

~RT~

Guess what? Evaporative cooling in a closed system will work for one reason. Even though people say you should let the water condense back in side having it condense is a GOOD thing, it means the water is COOLER. Which means...... even if it doesnt escape the system the water will cool down enough on its own..... if you are conserned about water temps cut thin slots in the tower (up and down slots) and insert copper sheets........ evaporator and radiator.

Yeah, being open system is the main charateristic of any bong -not really an advantage or disadvantage. Heck, if you have a large enough reservoir w/o showerheads or drips, it still qualifies as a bong because the water has plety of room to evaporate which unfortunately means that we....

....can never close-up a bong. Water MUST be allowed to evaporate. Water vapor MUST NOT be allowed to condense -if they do, the latent heat of vaporization/condensation will pass back to wherever they settle on. Moist air MUST be allowed to escape otherwise water won't evaporate. But this is only for the definition of a 'bong'.

Your workaround is actually a radiator since heat is convected (by air) away from your rig and this permits the condensation of the moist air without (much) rise in temperature. The internal process of evaporation and condensation might just sustain itself -very much like that in a heat pipe. But the big, big minus of this scheme is space. You're gonna need lotsa surface area for the moist air to form condensates, and lots more on the outside for air to collect the latent heat (ala HSF), and room for the showering/dripping process as well. Too many redundant steps when you can just get a radiator and be done with it.

So to summarize: Either your throw away heaty water, or heaty air but you're not supposed to reclaim either of them back otherwise no cooling will result. Something must be 'spent'. Air seems to be 'recycleable' but it actually passes on it's heat to other air molecules and those in turn....ad infinitum so the heat is very much 'evened' out. Try watercooling w/o radiators or bongs but with a 100 gallon reservoir and you get the idea.

I realy think the whole bong cooler idea needs to be scraped. Its just not a realistic permanent solution. I would realy like to see heat pipes explored more. I know its much more complicated and costly but a good heat pipe with a very big heat sink can move way more heat than water ever can.

cjtune is bang-on (or is that bong-on?), A bong needs evapouration to work, if you did collect the water vapour and return it to the reservoir (difficult to do anyway) you would return most of the heat with it.
I think the bong is just a passing phase, with it's inherent problems it will never be a practical solution to cool a real world PC. An interesting experiment I'm sure but I would guess most folk who try out bong's go back to a radiator pretty quickly once the reality of bong cooling sinks-in.

I am very pleased with the bong cooler. It's the only way I have been able to keep dual pelts cool. A screen at the top will not prevent evaporation and should be considered a must to keep things clean. If you are getting dust in you water from the fans, put a filter on the intake. If you don't sant to make your daily trip to the well, with a little effort, filling can be automated with a float valve. No one said extreme cooling was easy.

thanks for all the feedback, much thanks.
Still am going to try to keep as much water in the system as i can... but the air.. i dont know if i can do that.
Either way this turns out, it will be a good venture into cooling and just some good testing to see what happends if i do......
like i said before, only temps will tell