on our last episode of lus tech disasters one of the custom liquid
cooled gaming machines in my home rack sprung a leak pouring gallons of water
over every system beneath it and my initial thought was oh I forgot to screw
in a fitting but as it turned out
despite taking precautions to prevent it it wasn't a fitting not being screwed in
it was a fitting completely corroding off of the block maybe some of the
metals in our Looper incomp ible nope
after spending hours inspecting them every other system's fittings were
spotless not a hint of corrosion to be seen I was so dumbfounded that I turned
to the YouTube comments for help and it
actually worked there was a strong consensus on what the problem was so
today with the help of pulseway who sponsored this video we're going to
hopefully Rectify this silent killer and
add a remote monitoring system so that uh if there ever is another leak hey at
least I'll know about it before I come home at the end of the day and find that
my computer peed
itself the first really good Community theory was that the fancy fuel hose we
were using as our tubing might use steel webbing to reinforce it which could
introduce galvanic corrosion but this was actually due to a miscommunication
on my part it's not fuel hose it's a general purpose hose and it uses a
textile reinforcement rather than steel so we can scratch that one another
interesting theory was that a micro crack in the delin plastic of the GPU
block might have allowed the steel screws that hold it down to come in
contact with the water but a close visual inspection reveals no cracks and
the threading for all of those screws is completely clean which suggests that no
corrosion occurred there a third theory was that a flaw in the plating of the
affected fittings could allow galvanic corrosion to occur with the underlying
metal which would explain why some of them were eaten While others remained
perfect but the thing is when you or EK
in this case is designing anything that involves metal and water galvanic
corrosion is something that they carefully consider so while the most
obvious way to avoid corrosion is to never mix Metals there are are many
metals that are safe to mix especially when they're not directly connected and
the underlying material of these fittings is brass which if you consult
this anodic index should be fine with the copper and other metals in our Loop
should be fine the story changes when
you apply a voltage and well we obviously weren't intentionally doing
that when you have a large power draw in one spot like a couple thousand watts of
computers in a rack and a low power draw in another spot like a couple hundred
Watts from a pump you're going to end up with a difference in voltage between
them which accelerates corrosion dramatically and can make compatible
Metals far less compatible but the good news is for this solution oh boy oh wow
we don't have to worry about the details this is an isolation Transformer and you
might be familiar with Transformers you would use one to take like a low voltage
and make it a higher voltage or vice versa like to run your sewing machine from Asia yeah if you're in a different
country that's a big one yeah in this case it's 120 volt on both sides you see
that made in Canada thanks Hammond Manufacturing but it decouples the
circuit giving us galvanic isolation or preventing a loop so in a
nutshell we're taking anything that's plugged into this guy and we're giving
it absolutely no path back to the main panel it's almost like Wi-Fi for your
electricity I feel like our analogies are making this worse the point is no
voltage differ fren wrap it before you tap
it where do we want to put this thing how about how about up here on top of
the tank the tank full of water I mean it should be fine right yeah I mean
realistically while we're here I should probably have the pumps running off the
UPS you'd have to run an extension cord all the way over there conveniently is
that an extension cord that's all the way right there yeah I really don't
think that's long enough I don't think it's worse than that yeah I don't think it's long enough look how long that is
that's a 25-footer it'll work you want to bet everyone's lunch on it if I'm
right you pay for everyone's lunch if I'm wrong wrong nothing happens fine it
has to go all the way down to plug into the bottom UPS it has to be managed sure
he's literally trying to Cable manage it as much as possible to prevent it from
reaching dude these are so satisfying I
will admit they are quite good LTT Store.com let's go that might be the
best thing you've ever done my kid's right there what no he's
not oh he's somewhere it's going to be so funny when you lose wow it reaches no
way no way you're buying 's lunch Get Wrecked fine even though I owe him lunch
technically yeah one of the big things that you guys
said was hey no matter what caused this problem you should really have
monitoring in place so that if it were to ever happen again you would know and
on top of that we can make automation so if there's a leak shut off the pumps
yeah it's going to be good theoretically everything is fine
now I mean but maybe but that doesn't
mean we're going to jop here okay what's next grounding grounding all right
you're not going out for a week says who
you going to stop me I have your stepdad's number keyword being
step are you going to take that he might
actually see this to take things to another level we're going to follow
another recommendation that came up a lot in the comments some of you noticed
that um I never grounded my rack while
the systems themselves are theoretically grounded using the third prong of the
plug that we plug into them the rack itself is not necessarily connected to
ground so we got a whole bunch of these
grounding leads and then what we just connect these from the back of every
chassis to the rack uh you could but we also got this here
catch o uh like a grounding bus bar so
you just stick that in the rack and then screw all the little thingies onto it C
man no no we got this we got this okay oh that just barely fits yeah so that
could go right there it's almost like it's made for a rack naturally we have
to ground our grounding bar to something for it to work as a grounding bar
unfortunately the rack is a bit of a ways from the panel and our electrician
who is going to do this properly for us is unavailable today so instead we're
going to have to open up the panel and tie the wires directly into the grounding bar it also means I didn't
have the correct wire so Linus happened
to have these like two pretty thick gauge wires so we're going to use those
instead I also didn't have the correct connector so I cut these hammonded ones
but connected them onto the long wire and now we have the right connector is
this how you should do this probably not but it's just a ground it's probably
fine right reys I don't know what I'm
doing got it hey it worked there we go
grounded I'm going to let lonus be the one to open the panel and stick his
fingers in there cuz it's his house uh so we're just going to leave this for
now Hammond sent us these sick little grounding kits and they have little just
blade connectors so you hook one side up to the server one side up to the grounding bar and then if you need to
take the server out for some reason you can easily disconnect it let's try it
with one of Linus's Nas units here just unscrew
that look at that wow now we just repeat like 10 times
while Reese works on getting all the systems grounded let's talk sensors we
have three different types starting with our leak sensor although calling it a
sensor might be you know a bit generous this is B basically just like two wires
you apply voltage to one side and as your leak Bridges the Gap with water it
creates an electrical connection between the other side and on that side you're just sensing for any voltage so when
there's no water it should be zero volish and when there is water say if we
did 5 volts on this side it'll probably show like one or two volts on this side
so that works and then we've got a flow sensor this one is really just to tell
us if say the water runs out or the pump stops working which would obviously be
bad cuz then the water inside the computers would boil which might cause a
leak this way we can not ify ourselves if the water is not flowing and then
we've also got a little float switch very simple this one if it's at the
bottom current passes if it's at the top current doesn't pass so we stick it in the water tank here at the top and we
can tell if it's full or
not I you not this is how we're going to test it later but before we can install
it we have to drain the loop which is going to be interesting this valve is
open and nothing is coming out I saw a
comment somebody said they had experience with hose bibs like that and
they said that some of the manufacturers started using really crappy cheap
materials in them that are not necessarily compatible with plumbing and
I just looked up in there and you know what I saw corrosion I read the comment and I was
like this is too stupid to be true lonus guess what doesn't happen
when you open this hose bib
no you're ballsy stick your phone light up there uhoh can you imagine if that's
literally what caused all of this you've got to be kidding me you know whole room
water cooling was exactly the same thing
it was a vendor cheaping out on the parts that Reservoir was supposed to be
stainless steel I mean you should have ched a plastic one but it wasn't made of
stainless steel I use a plastic one yeah you also were the one who speced this
supposedly brass hose bib smart guy so I bought it from a plumbing store so it
looks like we were both Bamboozled you don't get to be all yeah but at least my
idea was like a good one it's also good that I got this particulate filter yeah
I found one that's plastic actually it's uh polypropylene I think nice oh no it's
polyester it's like a t-shirt basically what are these made of H well those are
metal but that's the same type that's already in the loop because I don't feel like going to the plumbing store and
because I don't trust those things ever again I'm going to make my own valve
I've got a little guy and a little valve
look I fixed the leak it's going to get water everywhere
we have to make sure that we put it the right way there's these very helpful
arrows that I should follow oh look I
even Drew arrows on the tubes so I just matched the arrow with the arrow and
then I can't screw it up hey ree you leak tested this filter
right
uh filter installed is that closed
beautiful water in the filter yay the sensors are
great and all but they don't exactly work without something to read them in
the past we bought little like relay or input output boards for zwave or Wi-Fi
on Amazon but if you seen anything about how Linus's Wireless has been
working I wanted something hardwired and then I stumbled upon a company called
sequent Micro Systems which sounds super
nerdy and to be honest it kind of is all they sell are these custom home and
Industrial Automation boards and this one which is a Raspberry Pi hat just
plugs into a rasp pie this one has 16
Universal sensors on it that means we could handle all seven of the gaming
computers in here for leak sensors we could put a couple on the floor our two
flow sensors and still have room to spare it was a little complicated to get
set up but they actually had really good customer service the guy was emailing me
back within the hour responding and they have a bunch of different boards you get
ones that have some sensors some power outputs you can get ones that have mosfets you can get ones that have just
cereal like they make a lot of different different products and it's actually
pretty awesome this one in particular requires separate power so you plug in a
5vt power lead here and then it Powers
the Raspberry Pi through it directly there's also a battery for a real-time
clock that's on the board that they use for Hardware monitoring so if the Raspberry Pi becomes unresponsive this
board can reboot the Raspberry Pi it's one of those things where you wouldn't
really think about it for a house setup but if you were stuffing this in a wall
somewhere for industrial controls you want to make sure this thing is
operational if there's an issue it fixes itself imagine if you had like 200 of
them right in a perfect world I'd just hook that sensor pin right up to this
board and be done with it but unfortunately Electronics can sometimes
be a bit more complicated in our case we need to add something called a pull-up
resistor and that just makes sure that when there's no pulse being sent the
sensor reads a high signal like close to our voltage around 5 volts if we didn't
have that the sensor wire can actually sometimes float between ground and 5
volts which looks a lot like a pulse
which obviously we don't want the pull-up resistor makes sure it's only
ever reading the correct value so it's very important to add if you had an
Arduino that was reading the sensor instead they actually have a pullup pin
mode which does it on the board but in our case we're just going to add one on
this breadboard and in the future we'll just solder it into a piece of wire and
be done with
it does the flow sensor work uh yeah we
literally just finished wiring it let me start screen recording here is it in like a home this done or like what is it
do to control this no it can be if you want right now I just wrote a little
script um obviously we have to interpret the data cuz all we're getting is pulses
uh luckily they just give you a formula you take the pulses per second or Hertz
and divide by 5.5 that's your liters per minute so I made a little script to do
that cool hey 9 L per minute so we're
getting roughly almost exactly 50 pulses
per second 50 HZ that's the heartbeat of the whole setup and then if we go to the
other sensor which I did flow to it's off right now right no flow oh
no flow to the pool right now so what we'll do is adjust this script to send
that data to the pulseway API and then we can make whatever workflows we want
in pulseway and then on top of that we can just make a little script that sends
it to home assistant if you want super home assistant also allows like custom
components so you could have it on your phone now that the pool Loop is refilled
and running we should be able to take a look at our flow from both of the pumps
I found this little terminal app called TTY plot and you can Plum data from a
script to it and it makes a little graph in your terminal it's very cute this top
one is the local Loop so if I adjust the speed on the pump here right now it's on
low if we go to High hey look at that this is the
Outdoor Loop only pushing around 5 L per
minute which is pretty low and then the indoor Loop seems to hang out around 10
5 L per minute yeah that's pretty bad oh hey look everything grounded yeah look
at that it's all grounded you won't be out for weeks we were we were
overthinking it each of them we just found a screw and put it underneath the
screw oh that's great uh the only thing is we didn't ground it into the panel yet so it's not technically grounded
anything right I did run the wire over there oh okay mostly is this you yeah I
grounded it huh okay we should probably shut the panel off before we open it
yeah where's the where's the one for this oh this one oh my gosh okay this is
not an insulated screwdriver and is not rated for electrical work the only
reason I'm doing this is because this panel is completely off deenergized I do
not recommend this don't try it at home Etc oh my goodness who put this in here
this screw is uh it's like it's shallow
it's just camming out every time can I try to do it hold on hold on we might not even need it my
God oh my God zero zero okay so
everything in here is safe I mean well
we hope the rack is hooked up now see you got a little ground cable going in
there definitely not spliced inside the panel uh that
one now that the flow sensors are working let's wire up a leak sensor like
I mentioned before we have to apply power to one side so we'll plug this
into 5vt here and then the other side instead of getting a pull up resistor
gets a pull down resistor it functions in a very similar way but instead of
pulling the voltage up to your kind of voltage Supply level it's pulling it
down to zero because the path goes to ground the last thing we've got to do is
adjust the sensor on the board to be a 0 to10 volt sensor boom we can see that
it's reading about 0.17 volts when in
theory nothing is connected okay if I bridge this now with a screwdriver which
is metal it goes from like 0.1 volts
right up to 5 which makes sense when I let go there's no path and it reads 0.14
now we just need to try with some water hey it immediately registered .5
volts now instead of printing this to the terminal let's send this data to
pulseway fortunately for us pulseway has a cool feature called custom fields and
it allows you to attach custom bits of data to systems an entire site you can
do it globally if you want typically you would use this with their script system
say if you wanted to store the bit locker keys for all the systems on your network or the Windows licenses or check
battery data things that you would only need to read like once a day or
something like that but in our case we want to read these sensors like every 5
Seconds fortunately they also have an API so we can just edit our little
script instead of printing it to the console send it to the pulseway API and
then that'll set the data while I don't technically need the pulseway agent
running on our sensor Raspberry Pi I'm going to install it anyways cuz then we
can have monitoring uh obviously if the sensor Raspberry Pi dies that would be
not great and we'd want to know about that once it is installed it's really easy to connect to the account they
actually have a command called like pulseway registration just go register
no proxy C custom server yes and just pops out this big QR code and Bam it
updates the config file and starts running pulseway we should be able to see it in the pulseway window now hey
look at that Dreamhouse sensor Pi 4 now let's send some data I went ahead and
created a couple custom fields in pulse white one for the flow rate of the loop
inside the house and one for the flow rate of the loop that goes to the pool
and then when we run this output updated
count 9.45 and then if we go to the site if we
go to Sebastian Dreamhouse custom fields
we can see that it's 9.45 let's see if it stays that way if I go ahead and turn
the pump down boom 8.72 perfect now we just have to install
pulseway on some machines so we can make them turn off when bad things happen
we're first going to make a workflow in pulseway I made one here called shut off
water cooled computers ideally you would make a system group and then put all the
systems in it but for now we're just going to use this one which is land five and just set that manually I'm creating
this is an ad hoc workflow which means you have to manually trigger it but you
can also set them up to run on a schedule say like every day at 2: a.m.
or you can set it to run based off of a notification like CPU usage too high or
disc full then we just say shut down and
there isn't an option to just shut off computer because this is like an IT
management solution right generally you don't want to like fully shut off a
computer because now you can't manage it anymore they do have an option for reboot but we're going to say execute a
power shell command of shutdown I'm also going to add a send EMA email task if
the condition check fails because it would be a little weird for this
workflow to get triggered and then the custom field read a value that's fine
like you there's something wrong at that point so we should we should get
notified if that's the case if the flow goes below one liter per minute it
should shut off land five it should have it should have done it did it do it uh I
wouldn't say that it's definitely run the you're
about to be signed out Windows will shut down in less than a minute what no way
wait it's going to shut down in a minute it says it says less than a minute she's
shutting down boys maybe I need to adjust that script a little bit to make
it a little more urgent in terms of the shutting down but not bad yeah and when
we combine that with the leak sensors basically we can set it so that in the
event that something goes bad everything shuts off the last part
of our little Electronics project here is being able to turn the pumps on and
off so if we detect it leak from one of the leak sensors we can shut off the
pump and limit the amount of water that gets out and the amount of damage how do you do that with relays each of these is
a 40 amp 250 volt relay which is way
overkill for what we need I can just
plug a Serial cable into this which is in this case an Ethernet cable and plug
the other side into our sensor board and then control this remotely from the
raspy and the sensor board that means we can put this right next to the pumps run
an etherite cable back over here and Bob sh Uncle we can control the pumps
remotely long term I think we could mount it in the big isolation
Transformer box that actually has a switch already so we could probably just
wire this up to the switch but for now we're just going to do this to try it
this is um not my finest work but I've
spliced the relay in between the load wire on this power bar and these are all
connected with won nuts so they should be relatively safe and if we plug this
in this power bar should not be powered d
power bar not powered that's good now
let's plug in the relay board it does need its own source of power specifically 12vt instead of 5vt this
time so we'll wire that up here there's
also a few dip switches you want to toggle on this board we enabled TX and
RX and then the termination switch and then we just did the termination switch
on this side that's because each of these is the end device if you had a
bunch in between Daisy chains you would just turn the termination one on on each
one on the end if the board was mounted directly on the Raspberry Pi we could
use their command line Library directly but instead since it's going over cial I
had to turn off the cereal functionality on there so it's just passing through
and then enable cereal on the Raspberry Pi and in theory
hey cool you see them
clicking now we can plug this
in you ready yeah on see that's l up and
then we go off now I've just got to make a little script to toggle it based on
the leak sensor and hope it works so we've done the demo where if the pump
fails the systems turn off but what we haven't demoed is if a leak sensor gets
triggered the pump turns off well let's do it okay I'll go lick a leak
sensor 5 Volt's not going to hurt I've licked a battery before but how many
amps is it 5 amps it's fine 5 amps yeah
I wouldn't lick that I'm going to lick it I wouldn't lick that I'm going to do it well make sure you get it on camera
yeah yeah fine fine I won't lick it I'll just dip it in the water on the floor go
for it and
dip oh my God all right we've got a
light on that same power bar oh well did the flow stop I mean yeah okay now let
me unlick okay obviously we have to fix up the wiring here a little bit is it
going and she's gone hey so
theoretically well there's a lot more protections than there were before most
of them are just sitting on the concrete floor so if it leaks I'm sure they'll work
great I have a box we'll put it all in a we'll make it nice you know it also work
great pway who sponsored today's video you should try a free trial of pway
today and as a member of our audience you can save 40% on all of pulse's plans
just go to LMG Dogg lt24 or click the
link down in the description thank you so much for sponsoring this video
pulseway is your solution for Remote Management of all manner of systems not
just janky basement water water cooled ones yeah we built our own monitoring
system and then used pulseway to do all the system stuff and they have a fully
featured mobile app so you can diagnose and even fix problems on the go yeah
like if your pump stops working yeah you'll know even when you're in France
Windows updates uh temperature monitoring you won't be able to do
anything about it disc usage monitoring but you'll know no you can call your
team get them to do well you think I'm going to come to your house and fix your water tooling while you're in France
it's the pulseway pitch oh that would be helpful