i freaking knew that this was gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna carry the
heat away from this server rack and dump it in the pool but the way we're gonna
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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna do two separate loops yeah the roof is
gonna 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 what do you expect
what you expect is this message from our sponsor nzxt what are you using that old
rat's nest of a case for nzxt just launched their all-new h7k series
they've got tool-less panels for easy installs front and top mounts for up to
a 360 millimeter radiator a tempered glass side panel an all-new cable
management and cable bar system and support for a vertical GPU with their
optional mounting kit with a gen 4 PCIe riser it probably makes you a nice latte
too but don't quote me on that part the h7 comes in three delicious flavors to
pick from the classic with a solid front panel the flow with a mesh panel for
breathability and optimal performance or the elite tier which includes a tempered
glass front panel with three pre-installed 140 millimeter RGB fans
and version 2.0 of their new RGB and fan
controller with two chainsaws mounted to the side too
not really that last part but it's in the talking point so
you can learn more about the h7 series down at the link below if you guys
enjoyed this video maybe check out the one where we did the solar panel install
or actually they could do the one where we did the demo with the smart control
ducts for the air conditioning