I just got a crazy idea. I barely have room for a proper water cooling setup in my case of choice, but I own a big house and have my home office/game room right next to our roofed carport. Wondering If I could build a rig with either one very powerful pump, or 2 pumps tandem, and then have a big rad outside on the wall, tubes running into were the computer is on the other side of the wall. I would only need to make 2 very small holes in the wall, corresponding to the diameter of the tube, and my best guess is I would not even need to put fans on the rad, as I live in Denmark were temperatures is somewhere between -10 to +25C around the year. The whole idea started when I was looking up random parts and stumbled upon this product from Koolance. Its rated for PC use down to -35C! Actually, as I sit looking at it it could be an idea to use extender pieces from the rad and in, would need like 2 pieces for a total of around 80mm to reach trough the wooden plank I have right under my ceiling (its not brick wall all the way up) and into the rad. Then on the other side, use quick disconnects like these directly attached to the extenders and use EK ZMT tubes inside the room, so its real easy to route into the PC (also so I can actually disconnect it in the event of an upgrade or maintenance).
It's been done before so it's not crazy, something to watch out for though is if the water gets colder than ambient in the room you may get condensation.
Yes thank you, I just realized that might be a problem. someone on another site was talking it could be prevented by having two separate loops, one outside and one inside, but I dont know how that would work
You could do that with quick disconnects, but you will run into the issue of condensation the minute you go below ambient temperature in your room. The colder and closer to 0 you get, the more issues you'll have. It's not even worth considering.
As TMDD has stated, you'd be constantly be adjusting the set up to compensate for the fluctuating ambient temps - if you have a constant ambient temp then your a quids in winner.
You would need a temperature and humidity sensor for the room your PC is in and also a temperature sensor for the incoming cooled water, from that you can calculate the dew point and whether the incoming water is below it. If it is you can operate an electric value to switch the water to a different loop. It is a bit of work but it would be very cool - people that run phase change (a fridge) units on their CPUs have to deal with this problem all the time and they just insulate the block a bit.
Speaking from an engineering point of view, not a watercooler's - there's also the risk of the exterior surfaces of the outside loop components suffering from frost/ice damage, regardless of how much antifreeze you have inside the loop. Unless you're prepared to use copper pipe and braze the exterior joints and lag the exposed pipes, you may have issues with cold weather damage to pipe joint integrity and indeed the rad itself.
