I had a water cooling setup at my place for a few years. I used the minimum amount of plain old automotive antifreeze which is "not much" here in California. But even if it never gets cold here, the antifreeze keeps stuff from growing in the tank.
Then to take care of Gene's problem with "gunk" in the tank I set up an ordinary aquarium filter. It ran 24x7 even when the system was not in use. These small filters can be small and only use 3 watts of power or larger and use much more. But with no fish in the tank, there is not much to filter out of the water. A cheap filter keeps the tank clean. My use of water cooling was when I was developing an astronomical camera. The CCD chip was cooled to near-cryogenic temperature and kept in a vacuum to prevent it from icing over. "Noise" in electronics is dramatically reduced by temperature. This camera was literally counting photons from stars and thermal noise would have "swamped" the small signal. I had a development copy at home for software development. (ok to head off the question of how to get very low temperature with ware cooling -- thermoelectric devices were stacked with the last device bonded to the water cooling block. In any case, I never had an issue with the water not being perfect. My system used a 50 gal aquarium tank and pumps and filters repurposed from one of my salt-water aquariums. In the case of an aquarium with no fish, use a small pump that re-circulates the entire tank volume perhaps one per hour, and let it run 24x7. So even a 50 gal tank only needs a 1 gal per minute water pump. Other people were smarter than me. Seeing as a development system is only runs a few hours for testing they used a MUCH simpler system: A garden hose connected to the input of the cooling block and the output was let to a flower bed. No pumps, no filters. On Sat, Nov 7, 2020 at 5:35 PM Andy Pugh <bodge...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On 7 Nov 2020, at 23:37, Gene Heskett <ghesk...@shentel.net> wrote: > > > > Something that's better suited for long term lack of use and uses > > distilled makeup water. But I've no clue what to use in its stead. > > Maybe waterless coolant? > > https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B010F9ZBEU > > As an example > > > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
