Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “They told me I was stupid – heating my pool with computers”.
I freaking knew that this was gon na happen. It is so bloody hot in the server room here in my new house, it’s a confined space. It’S insulated to keep all the noise away from the rest of the house and it is chock full of computers and the worst part is that this ain’t, even the half of it, we’re gon na, add five more systems for the land, gaming room and maybe another One yeah, maybe another one for the family room and when that happens, if anyone has the audacity to actually game on these machines, they’re going to cook now here’s the thing we have cooling in here. This is an hvac system. We got air conditioning, but that would be crazy. This heat isn’t worthless, it’s energy and when there are so many parts of this house that require hot water like the hot water, faucets or the in-floor heating, why would i pay money to generate heat and then pay extra money to get rid of it? Jake and i came up with a devious plan using those pipes right there, we’re gon na carry the heat away from this server rack and dump it in the pool, but the way we’re gon na do.
It is a little different different like our sponsor nzxt. Looking for a new pc case, give your components, a shiny new house with nzxt’s all-new h7 series. They feature tool-less panels for easy access and installs, with a gorgeous tempered glass side panel, learn more at the end of this video or at the link down below we’ve got two main problems to solve.
One is how to transport that thermal energy from the server room to the pool efficiently enough, that we aren’t just losing it all to the environment around us and two is how to dump that thermal energy into the pool water. Now the simplest way on the surface would be to just plumb an extra couple of pipes in and use the pool water as a gigantic reservoir. But this raises some serious issues. First and foremost is that pool water is freaking nasty.
Imagine if you will a microfin arrangement like this, but full of dead, skin cell goo, hair bits of leaves and bird gross and it gets even worse. Pc water, cooling components contain all manner of different materials. In this system alone, we’ve got petg, copper, nickel and rubber.
In the o-rings that seal everything up so even if i could filter out all of the debris, i’d still be running a very high risk of a reaction between all those materials and the chlorine and other chemicals that are added to pool water, a risk. We don’t have to take i’ma walk you through our original plan, these pipes from the server room, we’re gon na run into a heat exchanger and when i say heat exchanger, you probably think of one of these, which is designed to take hot water and dissipate that Heat to the surrounding air, but there’s a different kind of heat, exchanger called a fluid heat exchanger, where what you’re actually doing is you’re taking one cold fluid and one hot fluid and exchanging heat between them, they’re super cool and actually really affordable. Unfortunately, this one’s made of steel, which is going to be a problem for well everything.
I think the good news is that you can get heat exchangers made out of more exotic materials, including titanium, which would have been perfect for our application. So easy peasy right, you got your fresh distilled water, going back to the server room here you got your heat exchanger right here. You got your trench down to the pool cold side, hot side, bobs your uncle you’re done at least that’s what i thought until i talked to the pool contractors, i’m going. Okay, your existing filtration system in the pool house. I want to plumb in the heat from the solar panels and the heat from the server room, and it’s all like integrated and intelligently switches, and they looked at me and they’re like what which led me to a truly big brain idea. If pool water is causing all of my problems, corroding my computers or adding filtration complexity to my dual loop heat exchanger concept, why don’t i not pump it at all i’ll just take my fresh water, completely closed loop system, plum it into a more traditional radiator and Then just let the water passively exchange heat with the fins they haven’t even poured the concrete yet so i could do like a little all-cove or something put bars on it, so that you know nobody accidentally sticks their foot in it.
It’D be freaking perfect. I mean sort of perfect that that’s pretty janky, which is when i had a brain flash and my brain went from big to galaxy. Remember when i showed you guys the in-floor hydronic heating system here at the new house. You probably see where i’m going with this. If i can use one of these to heat up water run it through plastic tubes encased in concrete and heat up the air. Well then, surely i could do the same thing in water right.
The plan, then, is to have our plumber, who actually says he’s done something like this before really take yeah. I know right. Take pvc tubing and run it inside the rebar once that’s done. The way they apply concrete to these is not actually to put a mold down and pour it. They actually shoot it, like someone’s, got a big hose on their shoulder and then someone else is feeding yeah, it’s called shot cream. So once that’s done, our tubes will be completely encased in the concrete, which is where this guy comes in, because getting all of these separate systems to work together requires temperature, sensors relays valves yeah.
So it’s gon na get a little complicated when we have three heat sources at this point and one of the heat sources, the server room, we actually have to make sure it doesn’t get too hot right. We don’t want the computers overheating. Here’S the plan we’re gon na, do two separate loops yeah the roof is gon na go into the walls. Conveniently i already asked for extra insulation on the pool.
Apparently they don’t normally put foam in here. Is that just because we have such a moderate cloud yeah, it doesn’t really leak out the sides, so we already have extra insulation, which means that our heating loop, the really hot one, is going to not lose too much heat. That way, it should mostly go into the pool then we’re going to do a second loop in the bottom, so the server room is mostly just going to be about cooling, the water and less about heating the pool right. Hopefully we can cool it enough that we basically don’t have to use external radiators, although we’ll have them just in case, so this would be hot, no matter which way it goes in the event that the pool is drained. We would have our cold come back from the radiator now, what do you? What are these servers? Also go burr? Oh, that makes sense alex usually does a better job. Basically, we’ve got two independent loops number one is taking heat from the sun, using it to heat up the water in the solar panels, which, incidentally, makes them run more efficiently and they make electricity. Water cooled solar panels, so we’ve got the hot water from that. That runs to this pump, which is running on a relay that is triggered by the temperature of the pool water.
You’Ve got your hot water going into this loop. That goes around the walls of the pool and then cold goes back up to the solar panels. Noise.
Then going into the floor of the pool, we’ve got our cold water, going to a check valve to make sure that this never runs in reverse. It doesn’t backflow. That would be super terrible, especially because we have two zones: cold water comes into our server and there are a number of different ways that we can tackle this jake and i have talked about everything from running individual water blocks to the machines with just a big Manifold on the wall to doing one of those big water cooled doors like they have at sfu, so that takes just the hot air from the room exchanges it with this cold water. The water doesn’t even need to be that cold. That would probably be the best way to do it. Yeah anyway, we heat up the water. Somehow it goes to this pump, which will run all the time unless i need to perform maintenance, yeah yeah pump in here or pump out there.
Probably just put it in here and then we can put it on battery backup too, because the servers can’t be on and the pump off unless it’s a cold door. If it’s a cold door, that’s fine glad we thought of that. Okay, yes inside then we’ve actually got a t here. Oh so it’ll go one of two ways: if the pool is calling for heat, then it will go to the pool, and this one would be our priority.
We want to dump all of our pool heat in from this one yeah. Then, if the pool is not calling for heat, it can actually kick in this additional radiator. So this is not really a one or the other.
This is a this or this, and this do you have a way to get water yeah right right there, oh hi, hose though yeah. I know how to use that one we tried to get it out of here. We’Re end up doing like a wet t-shirt contest here, speaking of which this t-shirt available lttstore.com.
We could just walk over to the sink. You know um yeah. I could wait. Oh oh crap, um yeah. It’S probably actually not best to introduce a bunch of air into that loop he’s not breaking things. I swear this probably isn’t the best time for me to tell you that there’s an insurance slate she’s here to do a walk through. You saw nothing, hey! Look! It’S not leaking andy. That’S good burn me coming through some good pressure, some thick pumping right there. We just need some kind of temperature sensor in the water. This isn’t a temperature sensor. This is actually a water leak sensor, but we’re just going to pretend like it’s a temperature sensor, because look, oh, that water is really hot. It’S pretty juicy spicy hot water.
Ah, there you go pump turned on. We got our radiators. Getting nice and cool you’ll probably have noticed that this is kind of similar to the hydronic heating system in the house right. We just have two zones, one for the radiator and one for the pool. We could totally use a system like this valves just like this. With like a manifold, and this would be pool – and this one would be radiator – well, that’s the thing that made me think. Oh, this isn’t such a crazy idea.
After all, because we’re not reinventing the wheel. This is a wheel that is extremely well established and reliable. There’S got to be like two zone manifolds you can get.
I wouldn’t even be surprised if they just like custom make these, and you know what they have four leads on there. Two of them are for opening and closing the valve, but the other two are to send a signal to something so rather than like having to smart control the pump you could just take those two leads to trigger the pump and then it’s like analog. So if that valve’s open it turns on the pump, that’s the same system. We use here for the boiler, there’s no electrical control of the boiler. It’S just using that. So this isn’t the most compelling demo ever but come on guys the pool’s not even built.
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