Usually it's my kids who break stuff, and I'm the one who gets to fix it.
But when corrosion in my DIY pool water cooling setup caused a catastrophic leak on his gaming PC,
it seemed like a perfect opportunity to flip the script.
And sure, it's my fault it broke, but what good are kids if you can't put them to work?
And besides, what a great opportunity for some learning.
Yay, learning. You can learn the name of today's sponsor.
Just because you have a spill on your computer doesn't necessarily mean that it's dead.
If you can unplug it, clean it, dry it off, and fire it back up, it might work,
just like the PC that we intentionally spilled coke on.
But that's not what happened here. This system sat for hours in a puddle of water and its own corroded gunk.
It should be dead, but somehow miraculously it survived, so then no problem.
All I've got to do is have my son put his water cooling back in, right?
Wrong. Because if we do that, it's probably going to corrode again.
So we've got to figure out the root cause. The best theory we have is that this was caused by a ground loop between the pump and the computers,
which causes a slight voltage differential which can drastically accelerate corrosion.
Jake is actually working right now on the video that maybe you guys have seen,
where we added an isolation transformer to the pumps and grounded the rack, which means,
Hey, come on, boy. It's time to learn how to clean a really crusty water block.
What am I ever going to do this again? Hopefully never, if Jake does all of this right.
Probably soon. But if it happens again, we're going to be in relatively okay shape
because one of the other things we're going to be installing in the boy's computer is a leak sensor.
Well, what are you waiting for? Let's go. Luckily, the only things that got eaten away were the fittings.
So all we've got to do now is remove all of the gunk that was deposited from the fittings onto these blocks.
Now, the bad news for you is I accidentally left my brasset at the office.
So you get to try this Mother's Magan Aluminum Polish,
which I don't know if it's going to work, or Goof Off, which I really think is not going to work.
Here's a toothbrush. You'll need water.
Okay, that's not doing much. Let's try some Mag Polish.
That's probably not what that's supposed to look like. Oh, it smells so bad.
Okay, let's see. Very similar to how it did before.
It really does, doesn't it? I wonder if pick action is a better bet.
That does actually seem to be a lot better. Do I really want to get a dental pick into all these little bins?
Well, you're not doing it. Oh, yeah.
I'll go get you a dental pick. I changed my mind. While I thought I had dental picks, it turns out I actually don't.
But what I do have is a lot of X-Acto knife blades.
Oh, wow, yeah, this comes off really good. Don't cut toward your finger like that,
because if you put that into your thumb, we will have to go to the ER room.
And you'll need a tetanus shot like me. I got attacked by a cat.
So fun. I wouldn't rather be doing anything else.
I'll tell you what, boy. I'm nothing if not fair. You clean that piece.
I'll clean these three pieces. OK?
Good deal? Maybe. What I didn't tell my son is there is another way.
I brought an ultrasonic cleaner home.
I could clean so much water block with this bad boy.
Got some general purpose ultrasonic cleaner, lemon scented.
There they go. I hope I have enough of this.
I only have the one jug. Extra strength formula.
This product is a concentrate. One part product with 10 parts water.
I have created some work for myself.
I don't even know what color the back is supposed to be.
Just salvage some of that back.
Oh, yeah, buddy.
And here's some water.
Why don't we kick things off with the top of the CPU block? All of this stuff was pretty easy to get the gunk out of.
I actually did that before. But what's hard to get at is these threads in here.
This should help with that in a big way. Let's heat it up.
Right, I forgot what a horrible noise it makes. OK, let's throw this bad boy in there.
Dude, ultrasonic cleaners are freaking awesome.
Can I use the ultrasonic cleaner?
Sure. When were you going to tell me about the ultrasonic cleaner?
It wasn't. These are great. They use ultrasonic vibrations to create these little scrubby
micro bubbles that will remove any debris and crud from the surface
of like a water block or a piece of jewelry or whatever the case may be.
Wow. Not that we necessarily need it. You made really good progress.
Yay. The boy can do work when he wants to. Check this out.
Oh my God. Yeah, sorry. That is awful. Yeah, I know.
Whoa, look at it rip off this corrosion on this bad boy.
You can actually see big flakes coming off this guy. Check that out.
Now it's time to pull the system. So go around to the back, get it turned off and unplugged.
We're going to be doing two things. We're going to unjerry rig it. So you can see I threw a replacement air-cooled graphics card in here.
That's going to have to go. And we're going to add a leak sensor.
Now Jake is working on the parts that will do the actual monitoring and handle
automations to turn the systems off in the event of a leak.
Meanwhile, we will be installing this leak sensor.
This appears to be too. Are we expecting there to be two leak sensors?
They just came in packs of two. How's that supposed to sense when there's a leak?
These are powered by five volt DC power. And basically what happens is if the two probes come into contact with water
at the same time, the water is going to act as a wire,
which is going to connect our powered probe to our sense probe.
I mean, here's the thing, like realistically the water is going to pour out
and then probably just dump down to the next server. So these sensors inside the computers, they might not do that much.
So we're also going to add sensors to the floor and that'll probably be what saves us.
Hey, we just got new cats. Do you want to come meet the cats? Come on, let's come meet the cats.
They have fleas, so they have to hang out in here for a few more weeks until they're old enough for a flea treatment.
And then that might actually be a good thing anyway because it'll give the other cats some time to acclimate to the idea
that something doesn't smell right. Anyway, here they are.
This might end up being a side adventure. LMG.GG slash Floatplane.
Now that the new cat adventure is over, let's get some stuff mounted.
Nice. Okay, now we got to strip it. Wouldn't something like this have a strip?
It does. Then use this. Yeah, but it only works on this part.
So then you figure out what gauge your wire is. You can look it up or you can just not bother.
Okay. And then squeeze as hard as I can. Squeeze as hard as you can.
Ow, it hurts my hands.
Maybe squeeze harder than you can. Next time. It hurts.
You know, you're going to get me made fun of on the Internet for having a boy with soft hands.
I don't even like put product on or anything. My hands are just already soft.
I'm shamed. Just tell them to not shame you. Yeah, they listen to me.
Why do they watch your videos if they're not going to listen to you?
That's a good question.
That's great. That's not going to short out on anything.
Ow, my hands.
Shamed.
Here's what we're going to do. We're going to slide a little thing in there.
Like that. Then we're going to put this down on it.
There we go. And we slide this out. And theoretically, we are exactly one paper width off the bottom.
Now you got your screwdriver, right? Yeah. Okay. We need to remove this power supply.
And we have a lot to do. I should go check on the ultrasonic.
Oh, it stinks in here.
Oh, you're going to put those in there?
Yeah. Why not? You can just drain it out of here outside.
Yeah, but I don't want to drain it. I want to maybe use it for some more stuff.
Maybe I could clean your mom's jewelry. Would you ever even know how scuffed this was?
Ow, ow, ow. Okay.
Wow. That looks like freaking not quite new, but certainly a lot better.
This is great. Check this out, Jake.
That looks pretty gross still. What? No, that's copper.
No, I meant all this. Can I see this? Yeah, Linus, she said, please, that's a magic word.
No respect. What the? There's still some shmoo in here.
So we might have to do another quick pass. While this is all still really soft and easy to get out,
and then maybe we'll throw it in the ultrasonic cleaner again.
Now is the perfect time to put our GPU back together.
I did have to scrape some of this manually, but after the ultrasonic cleaner, man, does it ever come off easily?
Since my GPU block is now clean, I'm ready to start putting my graphics card back together.
And the good news is all of my thermal pads survived.
What are thermal pads? Well, here, I can show you.
There's stuff that makes heat, and we want to move that heat away from it
so that it doesn't get too hot and die. But because they might be mounted a little bit higher
or a little bit lower, we can't just put a piece of metal right against it
because our piece of metal is going to be perfectly flat
and it might not make contact with all of them. So a thermal pad,
it's like a little pad that is thermally conductive so it can carry the heat through the pad and into our metal.
You know how your computer runs games really fast? Without thermal pads, he no work.
We got to make sure that this O-ring doesn't get crushed. If this gets crushed or it has anything in the way,
pretty much game over.
You guys, I asked for pipe cleaners. That's a pipe cleaner.
I know, but this is an arts and crafts pipe cleaner. What pipe cleaners do I use?
They try to clean the threads of the inside here and they bring me the fuzzy kind.
I'll show you. This one? Yes, this.
But a small one.
Oh, that guy.
Oh, no. Boy.
Oh, he let the O-rings fall down.
They're everywhere now. They were five when I put them in.
Well, where's the fifth one? Oh, I think it went down the drain hole.
Yes, it's there. Okay, good. Okay, well, no, don't put them there.
Put them in here. Let's get this thing assembled. Let's go.
I didn't take this one apart so I don't know where they go. How'd they go where they go?
It occurs to me as I'm sitting here thermal pasting this GPU for reassembly
that we don't actually know that it still works. While nothing else in the system failed,
I don't think we ever actually tried booting it with the original GPUs.
So now I would never recommend running
a water-cooled GPU without any water in it.
But hey, it's the do as I say, not as I do show, right?
Let's see if this GPU works. If we get an output, I'm just gonna throw it in the system and call it good.
Hey, look at that. We got an output. Let's go ahead and throw the system together.
Oh, that's exciting. Might be a good time to get some of these tubes
out of the way. How bad are these? Some of them don't even look dirty inside.
Should I just replace all of them? I feel like I should just replace all of them.
Actually, before I do that, I should test our new power supply bracket and make sure that it works.
Oh, so perfect. Uh-oh.
Did we leave enough clearance for the barrel jack? Oh, no.
Oh, it's perfect. It's flawless.
Look at that. Professional. So our five-volt leak sensor is gonna go in there like that
and our fiber objects go in like that and the whole thing goes in here like that.
Wait. No, there's not enough clearance for the barrel jack
and the power supply.
New solution.
No nut to secure the DC barrel jack thing because, I mean, I don't know.
Does it really need one? It's kind of in there, right?
And it fits. Yay.
You know what? This is kind of crazy, but because of the friction with the power supply,
it's actually really secure in there, even without the nut.
Like, I cannot move it. All right, we're back on track. Let's get the leak sensor back hooked up.
There, I spared you guys a lot of the boring details, but she's completely re-plumbed
and everything is ready to close up. I'm afraid I'm not optimistic enough
to close up the top panel and slide it into its spot in the rack.
So we're just gonna hook it on the top where it was before,
hook up the water pipes at the back and see what happens.
Boop. Boop.
I don't have to power on the system in order to get liquid to flow through it.
So this is a perfect time to see if anything's leaking.
Everything seems fine. I mean, it should, you know,
we removed the corroded fittings, but when you disassemble and reassemble water blocks,
you can make mistakes, right? Dude, I'm stressed.
I don't remember the last time I was this stressed to turn on a computer.
Let's go see if she fires up. This is the monitor that's supposed to be lit up.
Give her a sec. She's memory training.
The memory's trained. Oh, thank God. Woo-hoo!
Let's see how the temps are. All right, well,
I should have repasted the CPU block. You didn't repaste the CPU block?
Well, that was pasted on there. Oh my God. I'm gonna repaste it.
I even brought PTM7950 from LTTstore.com for you.
Oh, I didn't see it. In fairness to me, there was a solid chance
that none of this was gonna work at all and any time we spent on it was a complete waste.
So now that I know that the thing actually works,
I can just pop this off, throw some more pasted on. Yeah, yeah, that's not enough pasted.
Throw some more pasted on there and we'll call it a day. Ah!
Thermal pad time. Hmm, temps are exactly the same.
I bet the flow rate is lower from adding the filter.
It's still going 10 liters per minute. That's a lot.
Divided by seven systems. I think this might be a flow rate thing.
Was it like that before? Hmm, I don't think so.
I mean, I can also check one of the other systems.
Yeah, this one's the same. Realistically, they aren't 3D rendering on these systems.
But in the long term, it might be nice to solve the flow rate issue,
maybe a second inline pump. The more important one is the GPU anyway.
So let's get that started. This one I'm expecting to be okay.
Oh, well that's great. This GPU is under 40 degrees though.
And it's pulling 220 watts.
Alright, gaming systems for gamers. Do they game?
Casual 175 frames per second in Halo Infinite on medium 1440p.
Oh, no. Oh, no, don't kill me, please.
Oh, no, no. Oh, no, no. Got him.
Oh, double kill. Oh, dang it. It's a lot easier playing on my kid's account.
His MMR is not as high. Alright, cool.
Well, that's enough of that.
Time to throw this thing back in the rack.
I may have made a slight mistake. What'd you do?
I buttoned everything up before we actually tested the leak sensor that's in there.
I can unbutton it. Yeah. Alright.
Is this going to hold? Yeah, seems like it'll hold.
Okay, leak test time. What if something catastrophic happens?
Theoretically, all we've got to do now is take the other end of that barrel jack lead,
hook it into this leak sensor, which you guys would have seen in the last video.
Now I just... Pour some water in the computer.
Basically, because it failed here last time, I put the leak sensor right there.
So if this tube just comes flying off again, she's right there, bud.
She's right there. Oh, my God. Are you actually...
What? Oh, is it off? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Computer's off. Chill. Oh, my God.
Okay. All clear on sensor eight, which is the leak sensor. So in theory, when you bridge these connections with water, leak detected.
Okay. That's a lot of water. Paper towel, please.
Oh. Okay. I mean, it's not that much water.
Yeah, it would mean it would. It just is a lot of water for what I would like to put into a computer that has other computers running beneath it.
Still registering? Still registering. Oh, wow.
Well, that's really good. Actually, I can see how it's working.
You don't need water between them. Just enough surface tension.
On both tips. And then it registers.
So that means we've got the distance just right on these. We don't actually need a ton of water.
Right. Because the chassis is metal. It's using the chassis as a circuit, which is usually a really great thing to do with your computer.
Well, look. It's only five volts. It should be fine.
It's working. 0.6.
Come on. Blow harder. 0.4.
0.3. Keep going. I'm going to pass out.
That would be funny. Oh, man.
Oh, lightheaded. Oh, okay. It's clear now.
If this registers a leak in the future, just come in here and start blowing on it.
I mean, I was going to say, well, no, I got to come in here and start ripping power out of things.
But I kind of don't. Well, the UPS as I do, but everything else is going to be shut down.
I did bring you brackets to move your UPS if you want to do that at some point.
I probably should. In a perfect world, we'll put in some concrete anchors or something like that.
And we'll just mount them to the wall over there. And then what's nice is that'll actually give me another six rack units of space in the rack.
Not that I need more machines, but you never know.
I guess now's a good time for us to change out the coolant in these systems to just in case everything else wasn't enough,
make real good and sure that she doesn't corrode again.
Why is he so giddy about this coolant?
This is G11 antifreeze, which conveniently is the same stuff you put in BMWs.
Why does it always have to come back to BMWs with you?
Like, are you on their payroll? I just looked at the forums and everyone was like, yeah, just get G11.
That's the stuff that works good for this. So this is the real stuff then?
Yeah, I mean, most antifreeze protects most metals.
This is just like a high quality made in Germany. Good one.
Is this concentrate? It is concentrate. That's a 10 gallon tank.
Let's throw both of these in. It's blue.
Wow. Look at that good stuff.
One thing to note is that antifreeze does technically reduce the cooling performance a bit.
Yeah, it's not catastrophic though. A couple percent realistically and we're not going like a 50-50 concentration,
which is where you would really notice it. What we won't have protection against though is the non-conductive nature of pure water.
This is probably going to contribute to the conductivity. Yeah, you didn't have pure water anyways.
Well, it was pure enough that that system survived.
No more corrosion. Corrosion be gone.
Oh, hey, look at the down there. Oh, it's so pretty.
I think we need to flush out the existing stuff though.
I'm kind of thinking we stick the freshwater hose in there and leave the drain open for a while.
Oh, okay. Flushing this loop about as interesting as watching paint dry.
So you guys are just going to have to take my word for it that I swapped it out for the other coolant
and take my word about our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out the last part where we looked at the aftermath of the leak
and discovered all the corroded components.