Computer Room Hot?

Anonymous Coward writes "Here is a cool PC ventilation product I ran across. Like many faithful on here, I have multiple computers in a small room which really heat up the place. My office is a good eight degrees warmer than the rest of the house This product called R.A.C.H.A.L (Reduce Annoying Computer Heat And Loudness) vents computer exhaust into the wall, not the room. Might cut down on the electricity bills during those hot months.." Another approach: An anonymous reader writes "If your 'puter is getting to loud, you might want to consider some silent cooling. And the gang at OverclockersClub has just that. A three page review of the Zalman VGA Heatpipe Cooler. This thing is pretty nice looking, and with no power, no noise, what else could a guy ask for? Check out the review here. How come more companies don't do the "silent" thing?" Borked link fixed.

Slashdot: Hidden Advertising for Nerds

A quick search [google.com] on the anonymous poster's email address [mailto] eventually leads to this page [elance.com] which includes:

BACKGROUND: We're starting up a new company, Computer Exhaust Systems, wh ...

So instead of "Here is a cool PC ventilation product I ran across", he should really be saying "Here is a cool PC ventilation product that my company makes."

Sure, it's kinda neat. But I hope /. got some ad revenue for this.

Re:Slashdot: Hidden Advertising for Nerds

Actually, I think it's even worse than you (Greedo) suspect. Elance appears to be a site where "freelancers" bid to provide services in response to project posts (i.e., reverse bidding). I think your google sleuthing uncovered that the anonymous poster [mailto] won the bid for this "Web Template & Graphic design" project from Computer Exhaust Systems. I wonder if submitting this Slashdot story was part of the deal and, if so, whether they got a success fee when it actually got posted!

Toilet-water CPU Cooler

Here's a thought I had, but probably will never get around to building.

Lots of people go to the expense and effort of building/buying radiators or using large tanks of water as the heatsink for their water-based CPU cooler systems.

Last year, I started measuring the temperature of the water in my toilet tank. After a flush, it drops to 5-6 degrees Celsius. Between flushes, it gradually reaches room temperature, of course, but this is still no worse than a radiator or bucket. In practice, however, it never actually gets above about 10C (while room temperature is about 20C).

In other words, it's a supply of cold water which you were going to simply flush away.

Place a small bucket inside the toilet tank. Put a submersible pump in there, run the water to the CPU coolers, bring the water back and drain it over the bucket in the tank.

Everytime you flush the 6 beers you went through while flaming me for my Linux isn't ready for the desktop article [glowingplate.com], you can rest assured that the water which cools your CPU is being replaced with fresh, cold water. No mold, no mildew.

The purpose of putting the pump in the bucket is so that there's always a supply of water for the pump, even during the flush. And the purpose of draining the return line over the bucket is so that if your toilet tank doesn't refill for some reason, you'll still keep your bucket full of water and buy some time for hardware monitors to shut the system down if it's getting too warm.

I don't know how hot the water in the toilet will get, but think about this:

• The bucket full of water in the toilet tank is replaced during each flush but isn't actually available for a flush. You'll save water.
• You'll be removing the CPU-heated water from the house and will therefore reduce the load on your air conditioning system.
• You get to piss on the scourge of the overclocker, that excess CPU heat.
• Warming liquids enhances their ability to dissolve things, including ...dark matter. You might have to clean the toilet less often.

Of course, the only thing I'd worry about is the quality of the submersible pump. After all, if water leaked into the pump, then the water in the toilet could come into contact with one side of the AC line... the other side of which is grounded to your fusebox. If you happened to touch another grounded object while urinating (concrete floor, sink faucet, etc), then enough current could find that your stream of urine and urethral tissues are a more attractive ground path than the plastic sewer pipe. I think I'd invest in an isolation transformer (search ebay) to reduce the risk of highly ...unpleasant... damage.

Ahh... the joys of being an eccentric genius.

Re:Toilet-water CPU Cooler

If you're going to go to all that trouble, you may as well wire your water cooler into the supply line of the toilet: the tank fill pipe draws from your water reservoir, which draws from your water supply. Add a cutoff valve in the event that your water is cut off and you're done.

Of course this all smacks of the sort of thing a teenager would do to his honda - expensive, failure prone, and mostly useless.

My house...

My house is freezing, and I wouldn't be able to survive in my computer room (Basement, AKA utility room) without the heat. Good for corperations, not for me. Anyone else use spare clock cycles for warmth?

Re:My house...

This is why real geeks can sit around in their underwear (or less) while working on their boxen :-)

Seriously, during the winter months it makes a difference. Mind you, having my dog (a Newfoundland - think black St. Bernard) in the same room also generates enough heat to keep the room warmer - and he makes a great footrest.

Re:My house...

That's nothing -- my laptop warms /other/ people's hands!

Lea

Re:My apartment

I have 6 pc's running daily with half running 24 hours a day. My whole bill is $60-$70/month for everything (fridge, lights, 32" TV, DVD, etc.). This includes an Athlon and a P4. No SMP at the moment though. :-(

What are you running there to generate that much of an electric bill?

It's getting hot in here

So take off all your clothes!

Chicks love nekkid geeks in hot computer rooms.

Re:It's getting hot in here

Ehr, no, hmm, it's a little more, ehm, complicated: geeks love computers in hot nekkid chicks rooms...

Re:It's getting hot in here

That's fine, but for the sake of all that is holy, turn off the webcam!!

Why?

How come more companies don't do the "silent" thing?

The problem is, silence is golden. So therefore, in this poor economy, companies can't pay for the gold required and consumers can't really afford it.

Desperate for silent machines

I rate ambient noise as being important to me when buying a machine, and I usually pay extra for after-market fans to keep the noise down.

I would love manufacturers to start taking this issue more seriously. Choice of fans is important, but also the hard drives as well. Apple fans can look smug here I think - Apple do take this stuff seriously. The PC world? Not so much, and it's a real shame.

Cheers,
Ian

Hey, man...

If you don't have to yell to hear over it, how do you know it's working? ...or is it just me and my Sparc?

from the depths of AOL...

An anonymous reader writes "If your 'puter is getting to loud, you might...

BZZZT! Sorry Sparky. You lose any geek points by using the term "'puter".

What about appliances and rack-mount?

90% of my excessive volume and heat generation comes from various rack-mount appliances (like Cisco switches), not pee-cees. It doesn't look like these things are very friendly towards that type of environment.

The basic concept might still be sound, though. Turn your rack into an enclosure, add some intake fans, and vent the entire rack's exhaust somewhere else. (I wonder what the exhaust temperature for an entire rack would reach?)

Re:I don't get it

And then there's this quote:

Since the ventilation system restricts airflow somewhat, we noticed some systems had increased chassis temperatures due to poor design.

In other words, your computer will run hotter. While they blame it on "poor design", anything that restricts air flow out of the box (and trying to blow the air thru 4 ' of pipe, then into a wall, will restrict your power supply's air flow) will shorten your box's life. It will also void any warranty (counts as abuse).

This idea is "so" lame that I can't help but think we've all been trolled.

Re:I don't get it

This idea is "so" lame that I can't help but think we've all been trolled.

Agreed. This hardly smacks of professionalism. Check out these gems from the FAQ page [computerexhaust.com]:

Won't [the wall] fill up with hot air? They have yet to build a wall that is air tight, anyone who has ever worked in construction will tell you that there are probably 50 different places air flows into your walls.

They of course don't talk about 50 places where air flows OUT of your walls. Plus, they fail to address the questionable legality (re: building codes) of this "product".

Won't bugs get into my computer from the wall? Your system fan runs at anywhere from 2500rpm to 4500rpm and is putting out about 35cfm of air. If bugs actually make it to the system fan, the blades will chop them to pieces.. muuuhaaahaaa

Right.... 'Cause there are no bugs that _walk_ instead of fly, and they certainly couldn't crawl up the tube. Oh, and of course, you'll never turn your computer off ever, so there'll never be a time when the fan might be _off_. And what self respecting company would put "muuuhaaahaaa" in a FAQ.

Re:the tradeoff

then there's the 3rd option. the waste energy manifests itself as mana and enables me to cast lightning bolts to smite the puny dwaves AAAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

dammit. I really need to lay off the RPGs.

Ack...

Just do the right thing to begin with. If you want silence and no heat use a Cyrix C3. I'm sure you'll say it's too slow for you. Hey, you know what the saying is:

Silent/Cold/Low-Power. Fast.

Pick 1.

That's not gonna work.

The cavity at any given point in your wall, if it's to code, is about two cubic feet, surrounded by wood and plaster. Unless you had a magically powerful fan in your PC you won't be getting any circulation at all, because you're pressurizing a fixed cavity. Furthermore, the tube isn't insulated. This is a really silly idea. However, if you vented it *outside*, then you're talking something useful.

--Mike

Re:That's not gonna work.

Of course this isn't going to work. And in colder climes, if the air did circulate, you're going to get warm, moist room air being pushed past the vapor barrier and ruining the insulation. At this point, you don't have to worry about excess heat anymore - since your insulation's R value just dropped to zero.

You WILL have to worry about mold and mildew, as well as condensation ruining the wall panels, or running along the framing before pooling somewhere and causing more damage.

Stupid product that has less than zero value. Hope they have good product-liability insurance to cover all the health claims from asthmatics, etc.

Re:That's not gonna work.

I like how the front page of the site advertises, "Attaches using the existing computer case screws, no case mods." Yeah, they make up for the lack of case mods by requiring you to drill a big hole into your wall cavity.

All that, and an associates' reseller program to boot? Step 3, profit!

-schussat

Re:That's not gonna work.

On a side note, some supercomputing center in Minnesota, or somewhere like that where its really cold in the winter, pipes out their heat into the parking garage to help the cars start. Also, the Pittsburg Supercomputing Center's heat output is equivalent to 169 pounds of coal [psc.edu] an hour!.

Moisture problems?

It seems to me that venting the heat into your walls could cause condensation or other moisture problems inside of your walls. It also seems like you could get some very strange noises resulting from the forced air going into an enclosed space. The backpressure from exhausting into the wall could also shorten your fan life or possibly worse. If you have fire blocking in your walls, you could be blowing hot air into a space as little as 16" x 24" or so, and once that heats up you'll be getting the heat back into your room as it radiates through the drywall.

You also couldn't effectively use this on an exterior wall because insulation should be taking up all of the available air space inside the wall cavity anyway. Also, not all of the heat your computer generates is going to be exhausted by the fan, so this may not result in a huge reduction anyway, and it becomes even more problematic if you have more than one exhaust fan. Just a few thoughts I had.

If you hook it up to your sink

Hook the tube up to a water faucet, and connect it to your computer's intake fan (rather than exhaust), you can lower the temperature of your computer with an efficient, cooling mist!

Use the heat properly.

In the new Emery building in downtown Portland, Or. there is no furnace. The entire building is heated with the waste heat from the computers and server rooms.
It works well.

Unbelievably bad idea

As a carpenter/electrician/plumber in my spare time, I think sending computer exhaust to a residential wall is one of the dumbest ideas I've heard of. Venting to another room, crawl space, basement, outside, etc. is OK, but a proper wall cavity with normal studs only has a few square feet of volume. For an outside wall, breaking through a vapor barrier and sending the exhaust to fiberglass insulation is very, very bad.

The only valid application I can think of is for some commercial office space, where usually cheap extruded steel studs hold up sheetrock and the wall tops are open to the space above a drop ceiling. Also, the steel studs have holes in them to allow for cables and some horizontal air movement.

The website does not have any of this information concerning checking the validity of walls. Ugh.

OverclockersClub Graphs

Does anyone else find it horribly bad journalism/science to report with a graph where one bar is a third as long as another bar, yet the large value is less than 1% larger than the other because they start the graph at a random number instead of zero, and then just using a graph break in the scale?

If you make a bar graph and the values are 1% different, the sizes of the bars should be 1% different. Why do they not understand this?

one [overclockersclub.com] two [overclockersclub.com] three [overclockersclub.com] four [overclockersclub.com]

I've seen this at other websites, too. Does it irk anyone else?