milliondoll PC. Our nickname for this
wild nine server cluster with a combined
two pabytes of Kiosia Gen 4 NVD storage
has been causing some serious problems in our server room. Thanks to the 7 to
8,000 watts of heat it kicks out, it got so freaking hot in here that we needed
to cool our lab server room. And even
with the setup we've got now, it's still a little toastier than we'd like it
here. Of course, it is a lot better than it used to be, thanks to our proof of
concept heat exchanger setup that we cobbled together with a pair of APC data
center cooling towers that we found
behind a local data center. In a nutshell, this one grabs heat that gets
thrown out directly out the back of the million-doll PC. Then it pumps that hot
water up here where a second cooling tower yates that heat out into the
warehouse which we would have to pay to heat anyway. Hey,
Alex. The issue is that our proof of
concept here kind of introduced some new problems. For one thing, while this
tower does an ungodly amount of cooling, it also takes up an ungodly amount of
space. It's designed to go in between
racks of servers to chill the air, not
behind them, which is the other problem.
We don't have separate hot and cold aisles in this closet we call a server
room. So, our cardboard duct here is how
we get the hot air to the radiators inside our cooling tower. At best, this
is a phenomenal waste of space and at
worst kind of a fire hazard. Which
raises the question, why all of this
when we could just attach our radiators
directly to the back of the rack? It would not only get us our space back,
but it would probably work though. Oh my god, it's leaking water. Oh Jesus. We've
got all the radiators we could ever need. What could possibly go
wrong? A lot. Just like a lot of segue
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With that said, the current setup is kind of working. The filter is
filtering. The purge for the filter is uh please don't open purgeable. Oh my
god. And our auto topup with that uh
toilet float in it. Totally works. It
doesn't leak either actually, which is great. So, we don't need to change
anything major here. But what we are doing today is dealing with this pump.
It is weak sauce and is made of cast
iron, which not ideal in a mixed metal loop, even if you are using corrosion
inhibitors, which we aren't yet. Yet.
Yet. Are we adding that today? No. Oh, god. Jake. Well, once we prove this
setup works, then we might. Um, wait. What are you doing? I'm undoing this so
we can put the new pump in. Have you considered maybe we should like
disconnect it down there so it doesn't just spill water all over everything?
Sure. All right. Oh, Jesus. Well, what did you think was going to happen?
Water, J. You still continue to do the thing I said you shouldn't do. That's
what I I thought maybe you would think about what I said instead of just
continuing to do the thing you shouldn't have done. Okay. There's only an electrical box right down there that it
pours directly into. Oh, not just an electrical box. The electrical box. The
whole electrical room for the building. Yeah, it's down there. Um, now the
flanges I originally ordered for this project finally showed up. Uh, you see
they have a valve on there so you can isolate the pump. Oh, that's downright
useful. That would have been great at a couple minutes ago. Yeah, we could swap
it or we could just stick that one right back where the old one was. Yeah. Okay,
cool. While we're throwing this in is as good a time as I need to talk about the pump upgrade. Not only are we going to
stainless steel from cast iron, but this thing is about a sixth of a horsepower.
So, to put that in context, it'll do about 25 gallons per minute with 10 feet
of head pressure, which is about double what you'd get out of a typical garden
hose. Oh, yeah. There she goes. Now, I was joking in the intro, we
haven't actually cut anything in these towers. And then Justin just informed me
that we can't cut anything in the towers yet without getting the door off, which
is conveniently locked.
This is looking very successful. 10 out of 10. Should we just use a
drill? How does this work? Oh, what is
this? There's a button. Oh my god, there's a button. We are just actually
so stupid. We're so Yeah, we're so
stupid.
Oh my god, they're torques. Why are they Torx? Fortunately for us, you can get
extra screwdriver bit sets like this torque set for the LTP store
screwdriver. Nice. So, these radiators are a little
weird. There's three connections. I'm assuming it's like this is the inlet and
then we have two outlets. And I'm like, okay, let's let's measure these pipes
and I can go buy some of the fittings ahead of time. This is like 3/4 of an
inch on the outside. This is like 7/8.
And this is like 3/4. So I probably need
7/8 and 3/4 copper fittings, right?
Wrong. The copper fittings I need are 5/8 and 3/4. Why? I don't know. Well, it
turns out 5/8 copper pipe is not a type of pipe you use for plumbing. So the
plumbing guy was like, 5/8? Why do you need 5/8? We don't we don't sell that.
You have to go to an HVAC store. That's a refrigeration size. Luckily, I found a
plumbing HVAC store that sold both and they happen to have the fittings that I
need. These are 5/8. And if I look if I
if I measure them with the fancy calipers here,
0.76, and
0.7 675, 772, depending on where you
measure. Nothing a little solder can't fill. Starting with the inlet. Now, if
we look at the fitting here, we've got almost the amount we need. I I can't
make it work over here. So, we're going to leave this solder joint in here and
then we're going to try to put the fitting on the top. I'm hoping we can get like a tiny bit more straight
section. So, to try that, I'm going to heat it up and then Justin's going to
try to bend it. Like, we don't need
much. It's just elongating it.
Like, see, it's just like squished. Oh, no. Probably just made it worse.
Probably. This is definitely This is definitely not
better. It is actually worse. Why don't we just try cutting that off and just
see how it looks? Sure. Sure. You want
to grab a sawzaw? Yeah.
Hey. Yeah. I'm sure it'll fit right on
there. This is not going to leak. There's no way this is going to leak.
Wow. That is That's uh at her there, bud. For real, dude. Look how mint this
is. I don't want to keep doing this. This is making it worse. It's very important to make sure you clean your
definitely not destroyed copper pipe before you solder as otherwise the
solder won't stick. I had a really stupid idea that I think is maybe
actually not that stupid. I was trying to find something that would fit like
the exact or close to radius. And look at
that. A whopping I don't want to think
about how much longer later. We've hammered a socket in which mostly
reformed this one. The other radiator looks almost spot on. This one not
great, but I can at least force a fitting on there now, which means we can
solder it. Will it leak? Probably. But that's a
problem for later, Jake. I'm going to put some flux on here, which will clean
the part up when it's heated up.
Both of our radiators now have fittings soldered onto them and hopefully don't
leak. But that's not something I want to just gamble on. So, I wanted to find a
way that we could leak test it. And I've got this little leak tester, which is
literally just an air pump with a gauge. So, you hook it up, pump it up, and that
gauge will show your pressure. We spray some Windex on there. It's all pumped
up. But, if we look, our solder joint
looks clean. Ignore all the bubbles from the plastic. That's unrelated.
No bubbles. They're not
pretty, but they don't leak. And that's good enough for me. Looks like you guys
already cut this out. Yeah, we tried to find the ones that were the least
disgusting, and it seemed like the top ones were the least corroded. So, we
destroyed two towers. Okay. Well, this looks great. But I do have a question.
Is there a reason that we're salvaging these radiators rather than just using
radiator doors? It's like those are totally a thing, brother. I tried. They
either just like stopped responding to my messages, didn't respond at all in
the first place, or were like, "It will be $60,000."
Oh. And then I remembered we had this.
And this is more fun. Cool. Yeah. Time to build a water door. At least it's
more fun right now. We haven't got to the part where there's problems yet. And
build a water door. I shall. At least in theory. Now I'm
working on how we're going to lay this stuff out. The bottom and the middle are
going to be very easy. We're just going to use these 3/4 NPT to 3/4 ID barbs. So
they'll just twist on. The top connection on each radiator is a little
bit more complicated because we need to connect it to the bottom one. So what
I'm thinking I'm going to do is use one of these T fittings and then a right
angle. We'll use that kind of like this.
And then this guy will go kind of like that. So, we can have this tube come off
and connect to there. And this one's already connected. And then we just have
one feed in for each of our
radiators. It just looks like a normal barb, but spin it. Yeah. Oh. Ooh. It's a
swivel barb. It's exactly what I needed. And it was $11.
Really? Yeah. That's not bad. Green line hose and fitting, baby. They have
everything. Oh my god. And I just ruined them all. That's my job. Yeah. Okay. How
does this help us again? Because the door has to move and we can't just rely
on like a rubber hose bending back and forth. We'd have to leave a ton of extra
to make that work. Got it. No, that's got to go down this way. Okay. What if
that went here and I go in there and then it went going to hang. I mean, I
guess we could do it like down like that maybe. Oh, yeah. That's it's pretty
I don't have a nipple either, so I don't know if we can do that.
Yeah. Don't. I swear to God.
There are large tools here and he is one of them. No, we don't need this. But
that's doing the same thing. Yeah, but it's in a dumb spot, though. Why is it
in a dumb spot? Cuz it's better to just have it all in one place and then we just run tubes everywhere. Why? Cuz it's
easier. It doesn't seem easier. And then
this Why do we need to go to the bottom of this rad to the bottom of the other
rad? Because because let's say the other one
has already been done like Oh, okay. That already has a T on it. Yeah. Well,
wait. Why are you even proposing a new solution when you already solved it
already? I'm trying to tell you this. But you don't listen.
He's giving me a hard time, but he's the one who went to the plumbing store and came back with no nipples. How do you
manage that? Well, I didn't need a nipple because I had this excellent plan that you've now changed.
So, we're going to have our two hoses that come off of the tubing that's in
the building, like the PEX tubing, go to here and here. This will be our outlet.
This is our inlet. From our inlet, it gets split only once, which is nice.
It'll go right to this input, and then a tube will come down over to here. And
then the other side, the outlet, it gets
really freaking awful fast. We'll have our input splits right here into this
guy. And then it comes down into here.
Splits again into this guy in here. Plugs into
here. Splits again down to there. When you're doing something like
this that's a permanent installation. There's a much better type of hose clamp
that are constant pressure ones where it's just like a giant spring. These
ones are fine, but they can loosen up over time, especially in an environment
where there's like a lot of vibration. While Linus works on getting the fittings for our leak testing thing, I
am screwing the radiators in. They luckily have a nice like L channel on
one side which we can just screw directly through the door to hold the
one side and then on the other side we're going to use these mounts that Justin 3D printed along with T-nuts that
are really meant for 8020 but have a really nice flat face which should hold
nicely against the grid and that'll hold the other side. This is a big moment.
I suspect there will be at least one place that is leaking. You know what?
I'll take that bet. I No leaks. Oh, what? I say no leaks for lunch. Uh, I
don't know that I would bet anything on it, but I say no leaks. Really? Yeah,
dude. There's no way. Do you remember last time doing that the the first
setup? Oh my god. I do. Oh, I found a leak. Shoot. Exactly on where the Teflon
tape got all crumpled like I was just saying. Dang it, Jake. We're going to
have to do a lot of removal of things to get at that. Yeah, that's the worst
possible place it could have leaked is right there. That sucks. But hey, at
least we're doing this now and not when it's full of water next to a bunch of
servers. Oh, hold on. What's this? I
think we got another one. Same thing. No, no, no. We got another one.
Upon closer inspection, it appears that when we bent this thing, we made like a
little hairline crack in that very bottom tube, which sucks. I don't really
want to redo all of this at this exact moment. So, I'm going to try and just
put some solder on it and hope that that holds. I already like scotchbrighted the
hell out of it, so it's clean. I'm going to put some flux on. And
now we get to find out if this is going to work. There was like the tiniest
little bubble on this fitting. So, I tightened it a little bit more because
it wasn't quite as in as some of the other ones. And I think we're good. It's
been like 5 minutes already and this dial has not moved at all. And I don't I
like Windexed all the fittings again and I don't see any leaks. We might be okay.
Fast forward a little bit and I've mounted the plastic side bracket
thingies on and we now have a water door which I've been told is just a rack door
with radiators on it. Surprise. Look at
that. It holds. What a monster. Although
with no water in it. Now you might be wondering what are we going to do about
all of this extra air flow? cuz ideally we want any of the air from the servers
to go through the radiators. For now, we're just going to use tape, but in the
future, I'm thinking we could 3D print a little like angled piece kind of like
there and kind of like there to duct the
air into the radiator kind of like a velocity stack
would. Pretty mint, right? Yeah. You
going to cut this off? It's blocking air flow. I You mean you complain about my
tape drop, but then you don't cut that off? Well, this is blocking air flow.
This is sentimental. Oh yeah.
Hi. Oh, okay. I'm really glad I put
valves on that. If all of this hasn't made a ton of sense to you yet,
hopefully it makes a little more sense. Now, we have our rack here. This is the
back. So, back here, all the servers, they're blowing a bunch of
air and it's hot. So, we're going to put
our radiator door here. And hopefully the idea is the water going through it
at like 20ish°ish will catch the heat. And then
once the air goes through it, it should come out colder. And instead of using
that giant tower over here with all the cardboard and stuff, the whole unit only
takes up about this much space. So we
save space. It'll probably work a bit better because it's closer. And um it's
just freaking cool. Hey. Holy dude. Oh, okay. So,
here's a really The air comes through. It is
maybe not strong enough to do this on its own. We might need to add fans. This
is a bit of a crazy concoction, but we've got a 1-in PEX fitting, which is
the same size as this stuff here. It's PEX plastic tubing. And then it gets
reduced down to 3/4, which is the same size as this. And then we've got a
swivel fitting. Kind of one leg there, and then one leg there. And then we'll
run our rubber hose from here to here and hopefully it just works. Previously
we were using fittings called shark bites which are kind of like a easy
solution where they have like O-rings and it's like a self you just quick
disconnect push it in there but I'm switching them up to crimps which use a
metal ring around the pecs and then you crimp them on with a tool and it
compresses the plastic together. In theory a much
more secure connection. We're going to have to find out. A little bit top, but
nothing crazy. And then
open. Ah, it's swiveling a
little. Let's um add a little bit of water. I guess
Jamie turned on the water. So, we're filling
up. So, this is just room temperature
water, right? We're cooling it with the air in the warehouse, which is around
20°. It's so weird to stand behind this and
the air coming off it now to be cool. It
actually feels like colder than the room in here.
Honestly, that's weird. That's so
weird. And then you open it up and you're like, "Oh god, it's so
hot. I suspect we're like cooking inside
there." But then again, the servers are taking in fresh air.
I don't know. Maybe it's fine. Got John here, our test technician
extraordinaire, god of numbers. That's awful, right? Yeah. That's like like
putrid, right? You actually like kind of feel
it's almost a little cold coming off of
it. Like shockingly working. You've seen a little
bit of this, right? Yeah, a little bit. How well do you
think this is going to work? Uh, you
know how hot it was in there with the other cooling tower in there, right? You can feel it already kind of. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay, come on. So, let's let's take a sample. Stand behind the thing. I know
it's weird. There's so much space in here. Awful, right? Like actually
horrible. Stand behind the
thing. Like, it's cool. Oh my god. What?
What did you do? I don't know. Yeah, I know, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah,
we made our little double fan stackeroonis. These are Noctu industrial
30,000 RPM fans. They're called industrial because they're meant for
industrial. This feels industrial, right? I think this is a reasonable use
of these. Um, I don't have enough of them to make this fully filled, but we
do have four sets of double, which is like
honestly barely enough for one radiator, but it'll be better than nothing. I can
definitely feel the air coming through is a touch warm when it comes through
these cuz it's really pulling that air through there super
fast, but it does work. All right,
brother. Isn't this the worst thing ever? Come, come stand there. I Jake, I
can feel it. Stand right there. I need you to endure what I've been enduring.
Oh, you having fun? Yeah, it's really hot. Stay there. Sorry.
Why would you put your armpits like that? Get out of
here. Oh, I'm sorry. Back there. No.
Wow. The door handle even works. Isn't that crazy? Wow. Like what? No way.
That's actually almost unbelievable. whole line. Well, how cool is the
Really? The water's not even that cold, but
Dude, it really takes the like the edge off it. I didn't just shut this. I
forgot that I left it shut for like the last 45 minutes or something.
Wow. That is night and day. And it
doesn't leak. We had zero leaks. Zero leaks now. No, there was no leaks. Oh.
Oh. Other than the leak that you caused earlier, the one that I had to fix, this
is being That is not true. This is being held together with like a millimeter of
solder. I'm actually genuinely like I'm
shocked at how well this works.
And the door even I mean it's jank, but it it does it does function. And look,
you can see our swivels. They swivel. Oh This one doesn't really, but we
we're not talking about that, right? Okay. Yeah, they swivel. They swivel.
Swivel enough. Yeah. Oh, god. Close it.
Yeah, it's really awful, actually. Look at the fans. Yeah. See, you can see
they're really pulling the heat through there. They're really drawing more of that hot air out of there. I think we're
going to need more active assistance for it. Oh, wow.
The door is like, if you find the right spot, it's like 30 35. Yeah. Which is
about what we'd expect. About room temperature, you know. Plus, we can't
dissipate everything out into the warehouse. And then the back of the servers are anywhere from 45 to 55 to
50. Are you going to acknowledge what you just did? So, as you found out, we
need a bigger power supply. Yeah. The little 24 watt one for that Noctua hub
only powers three of those fans safely. Yeah. Um and then I remembered we had
this laying around. This is an HDLEX gallium nitride PC power supply. This is
500 watts with no cooling. Or maybe
there is a little fan there. That looks like a little fan. It might have a fan.
It's small, but it's Yeah, it's pretty impressive to fit 500 watts in this
package. And you can daisy chain them. The main thing is that it's small and it'll be easy to mount to the side of
this thing. And then took a generic power supply cable. We had use some WGO
nuts. And then we have a Molex, which should be good enough to run that many
fans. I think Molex is like 100 watts it can do, right? We'll have a link in the
description for where you can get some WGO nuts and at least some of the other
stuff we showed in this video. No professional company server room would
ever look like this. How boring. Now, what we're going
to do is leave it for about 20 minutes. We've got our AC coming in. It's
apparently fixed. Comes into the front of the rack. The air comes out freaking
hot. We pull as much of the heat away from it as we can. Dump it out into the
warehouse, which this time of year we're paying to heat anyway. And then we see
where we land. We had a few more issues with the air conditioning, which is, but
it seems to be sorted now. And we've had it running with the door shut since
noon, and it's now 400 p.m. And I can see based on the chart that everything
does look to be very heat soaked. If we look at our EcoB thermostat, which is
what's controlling the air conditioning specifically, we can see it's pretty
much settled off from like 29.9 to 30
12° C, which is technically speaking a degree or two lower than we were at
before, which is uh great. I was just happy that we had all of the space back,
but um to also get a bit of a performance improvement is awesome. And
especially once we put the cooling tower we took out of the server room up on the mezzanine. I'm hoping that we can get
even better results. Let's go take a look with the thermal camera. Wow, it is
definitely still warm on this side. Look
at that. You can see the gradient on the rack. Like the front of the rack
38°, back of the rack 50°. Woo! She's
cooking. I added a few more fans cuz it seemed like a good idea. And to be
honest, I'm probably going to add a few more even. But looking at the
radiator. Oh, you know what I want to see is the hoses. So that is our input.
It looks like the outer temperature of it at least is
around 34° and then our output 36°. Not
a great way to measure the water temperature, but it does give us some
idea. That was interesting. 34.4
four and 36. It's interesting cuz you
can feel I can feel the heat coming through
with the fans, but then the air that comes through in between where the fans
are is cool. Let's try to crack this open a little bit on the back of the
machines. It's still around 50°. Anyways, it seems like the
servers inside, despite this being a bit warmer than it was before, aren't doing
too bad. Felt a little crazy when it was just like an idea, but now to actually
see it working in practice, I'm stoked. Just like you
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Vision Ultra today. So, thanks for joining me on this like 2 week long
journey building this freaking water door. I hope you enjoyed yourself. Hit
like, get subscribed, and if you like this video, maybe check out um the first
part of wholesome water cooling when we put the cooling tower in and set up the
pump and the reservoir and whatnot. the bones of the current setup.