Building and testing a new water cooling system for Peltier coolers

welcome everyone in this video i'm going to talk about water cooling again so i published a video maybe a year ago about this system and that came out to be quite popular so i want to give some additions to that and i also want to show you some even better cooling systems so what you see in this corner is basically a kit so you can buy this 12 by 24 centimeters radiator and as you can see it fits two 12 centimeters uh fence and then this kit also comes with this guy here which is a water tank i don't exactly remember the volume of it but roughly three to five deciliters and then it comes with a 12 volt pump furthermore you get these connectors i think roughly six of this and the original purpose of this system is to cool your pc components therefore you have this cooler i don't know if it is for the gpu or cpu and then you get another cooler which is either for the gpu or cpu so basically what you see on the left side is a wall kit and you also get some hoses and some other small gadgets and at the at that time when i bought this uh kit it was around 75 maybe 80 us dollars and that was like relatively cheap and what i did uh i used this to cool my patient coolers so patient coolers their hot side require cooling because that's where the rejected heat of the patio cooler and the removed heat from the court side uh ends up so for example we i i put together this uh cooing block uh this does not have any purpose this side it is just for clamping because it has some threads but what we see here is there is a particular here uh tec 12 715 so it's a quite strong 15 amp per unit and the coil side of that pantier cooler is attached to this heatsink and the hot side is cooled with this 4x4 centimeter water cooling block so that water cooler here this guy here was used to cool or keep the patio cooler cool and then i also use this thing incorporated in the system as a thermometer and flow indicator to measure the outlet water temperature or the temperature of the water which comes out from one of the outlets after cooling down the patio cooler so i could monitor the temperature of the water inside the inside the water cooling system and then this flow indicator is quite nice because it comes with this three way plastic thing so you can have this g one over four uh threads so it's very convenient to put these things there and you can attach your hoses on it and it comes with the electronics so this uh shows you the temperature but for me that's not enough because i want to be able to lock the temperature for example or use different units or things like that so then we will get rid of this and we will also get rid of this cooling system so why i show this to you is because i have a much better and much cheaper alternative to this so let me just remove a few parts and i show you something much more cooler so this would be the alternative as you can see it's a bit less parts so what i will have in my future system uh let's start with this so i want to tell you or i want to suggest you to check my previous video the link is here in the corner and check why i use this this is a flow indicator so this thing is just spins when the water is going through the enclosure and then here we have an ntc thermistor so we can measure the temperature with this thing and what i will have is i will use this huge radiator and then attach a small silicon tube here and then attach this flow indicator there with the thermometer so i will measure the inlet and the outlet temperature as well with two of these units and then since i already grabbed this as you can see this is a radiator and you will be surprised but this is big so the previous thing and i will put them next to each other to compare them but that was 12 by 24. well this is 19 by 30 centimeters so it's much larger and just to compare them you can see that uh it's of course almost twice the weight and the length is also a bit longer uh sorry for the weird angles or things like that but you can see so if i put it here let's say now they start at the same point and then you see that we have uh gaps here and also up here so we have this guy and this is actually a car part this is an oil cooler but luckily it has the same kind of outlet pipes as we have with like general water cooling systems for computers that means that we can incorporate it with our parts which we already have and we don't have to change anything and then uh what we have to do is we have to decide whether we just use two 12 centimeter fence so i put it like this and you can see that we can fit two of here and then still we have a large exposed area or we can have six of these and then put three in one row and three in another row and we have a better coverage and usually they have a bit uh like more rapid airflow so maybe this is a bit better so six of this or even you can use like larger fans and somehow cover it but now just to have some comparison between between the two uh systems i will just put two 12 centimeters fan somehow distributed on this radiator so then now you can see that we have a much better system and this part here at the moment when i make the video uh i will put the link in the description but this part cannot be more expensive than 15 dollars plus shipping of course but we always have to pay for shipping for everything so this is basically 15 roughly at least today let's say and it's a very decent radiator so you can see that it's quite comparable with my silicone mat here and then we have this guy here which is also roughly 15 dollars depending on where you see but as you can see we have a pump with a water tank incorporated and this is also this has the same diameter as this tube here so we we have basically here the wall water cooling system plus the silicon tubes to have the water everywhere and then we can use these kind of aluminium blocks this is a 12x4 which means that if you use a patient cooler you can fit three on this and i use patio coolers most of the time when i need water cooling so this is very ideal and since this has much larger surface area that also means that this can dissipate much more heat so it will keep the patient cooler at a lower temperature so if you need something where you need where you need to dissipate copious amount of heat i really suggest you to build your water cooling system with this guy here and then basically this is all so i wanted to show you that we now have a new water cooling system so what i will do is either i will test it with this system so this is 15 ampere unit so just by running this on 15 amps we have 230 watts roughly i will do the calculation and put the numbers here because i don't remember all the numbers plus the removed heat so if everything goes well i can test this with more than let's say 300 or even more than 400 watts so we will see how the temperature changes and as i said we will use this kind of flow indicator with the thermometer in it which means that we will be able to monitor the inlet and outlet water temperature so we will see how much [Music] cooling is actually done when the water is running through this cooling system so i think this is a quite exciting part because it's crazy cheap and if i put this cooling system together for example this what you see here and even let's say we use two 12 centimeter fence so one more fan plus this thing plus this thing this is not more expensive than 50 dollars however the water cooling system with this guy here and this guy here this here plus the gpu and cpu coolers it cost more than eighty dollars seventy five eighty dollars so you get better cooling i i believe better cooling for a fraction of the price so two-thirds of the price so you should really think about uh doing some tinkering and diy and make a decent cooling system and it might be that this is also quite good for pc water cooling so if you want to use it to cool your cpu then you might use it but at this moment i cannot tell you i haven't tested it so this is straight out of the box because i finally received this thing and some other parts so this is straight out of the box and i haven't tested so i cannot tell it right now if it is good or not but i strongly believe based on just the dimensions of this thing and this pump that we will get some better numbers so in the next part of this video uh what i will do i assemble this system i will create some sort of test bench so in the beginning i will just show this with the 15 ampere unit but uh i will also try it with something else uh i have a cooler block you should check my other video where i actually i was talking about the other cpu cooler or water cooling system i have a cooling block with four tec-12706 unit so basically they are attached to an even longer water cooling block than this and some heatsinks and stuff and they are used to be cooled with some kind of watercooling system and they provide some cord on the heatsink so i will try that also with this system probably so we will see so i will just assemble everything i will move to another table and we will do some basic tests on this and we will see how it performs so this is the assembled stuff with some other circuits and other devices so let's go to our water circuit first so this is the battery cooler here in this block we have the 15 ampere unit here the hot side is cooled with this four by four centimeter water cooling block and the quartz side is exposed uh by using this four by four centimeter heatsink the other heatsink doesn't do anything i just use this once again because there is a thread here and there so i can use this heatsink as just a simple clamp but there is no other purpose and these patio cooler will be driven with this large power supply which can put out 30 watts and 20 amperes max so i can run this on the maximum 15 amperes and i will do that because i need to generate a lot of heat to test the capabilities of this cooling system so let's say that we started from here so water came in from the pump there so that is our pump plus uh water tank i will show it to you from a closer perspective soon so then the hot water goes out and before it enters the radiator from the top we measure the temperature by this thing that i showed you so this flow indicator has a thermometer in it and here i have my circuit which i built in another video it's still on the breadboard but i will finalize it and i will put it in a box but uh so this circuit will show us the temperature of the water which enters the radiator and then the water goes down and passes through the tube inside and then it leaves the radiator here and then we measure the temperature here again so that will be after the cooling so we can see what is the difference between the two systems and then the cold or cooled water goes into the pump and then it just gets pushed back to the patio cooler and i could have made this much shorter so i could squeeze this more but i did not want to cut my uh tubes or hoses so it's a bit messed up system but this is all and then we have this electrical contact here and i cannot emphasize enough that these kind of clips are extremely cool and very very reliable check my description to see what i'm talking about i put this there as some kind of spring terminal clips so you can buy this box with or you can buy these clips in a box with different number of terminals but basically i made a 12 volt connection by this so all the positive and negative sides from the pump and the two fans uh come in here and then finally i will use this dc jack plug 2.1 millimeters to connect it to this power supply the black one here also in the description which provides 12 volts and roughly one amperes for the wall thing this system the stm32 circuit is just driven from uh usb so i will use a usb cable here and then we will see the temperatures so once again this terminal is very cool it's very very useful and it can withstand quite high currents so you can use it even for the patchy cooler itself now i'm using banana plugs but uh you can exchange that so now i will rearrange this thing because of course i don't want to blow the air against the wall because actually the uh fan is pushing through the radiator so the fan pushes the air through the radiator now even it seems like that it should come this way but no i tested it and also the arrows show that the air goes inside so that's what we have i will probably rotate the wall system by 90 degrees so the air will go in that direction and this thing will be closer to the power supply however it doesn't matter i have the cables but it's just more comfortable so i rearrange everything and then we run a test so i set up everything it's a bit uh maybe over complicated but i explain you everything so the patient cooler is connected to that power supply and we will run it at 15 amps and we will see what is the voltage so we can calculate the rejected heat uh i will measure the temperature of the chord side just for fun uh that will be done with this four channel digital thermometer check the link up there in the corner uh you can see how i built this and you can build it yourself it also saves the data to an sd card but for this experiment i will not use it and then we can go further from this so we also monitor the room temperature here and i can tell you that now it's 24.2 degrees celsius then i also put one thermometer here in this uh water tank so we can see what's the temperature of the water but we already measure it here and then you see this cable is running behind the radiator so that is just measuring the air temperature uh which is leaving the radiator so we will see what is the water temperature and what is the air temperature which already passed through the radiator and if there are any differences and so on and so on uh so yeah once again that circuit is connected to the inlet and outlet of the radiator and it will measure the temperature now both things show around 23.5 degrees roughly it's fluctuating but i uh haven't really did any averaging or something so the values are jumping but we can see for sure it is roughly 23.5 so that's all and now i just connect the pump and we will see what happens so this tank and pump is already on and it is already running and it's quite silent which i really like about this thing it's much more silent than my previous thing this guy here so this is very loud but that is not loud at all so we have the system running cooling is already enabled or it's running fans are also uh running and of course we don't have any temperature change because uh nothing is being turned on or something so i can see that the flow indicators are spinning however one is a bit stuck this but it's just a piece of plastic so it's of course it's not the best so let's see our power supply so now i haven't connected uh or haven't turned on anything here so i just max out the current and then slowly increase the voltage until we reach i don't know 15 amps so 15 amps through these wires they are already a bit warm and 16.9 volts so i put the calculation here showing the wettage and this is already crazy cool i can see that the temperature of the heatsink here is 6.5 degrees celsius so we will see and i don't know if it's visible on the big screen but here is the display and the first thermometer is this one here which is coming out from the radiator so this is the outlet and obviously the higher uh temperature is here which is the inlet so you see that the water is already quite warm 28 degrees but we have like a two degrees drop between the two temperatures so now i uh want to do only one thing is that we have a lot of wires here and this will collect all the moisture in the room so i just put a paper under it so if i touch it it's crazy cold it's actually minus seven degrees already and you see it's exposed to the environment and so on so it's like very uh like vulnerable to the moisture so i can already see the ice co being collected on the surface and i just increase the current a little bit so i want to maximize the use of this thing so i want to run it on the maximum and these cables are crazy hot i can still touch it and hold my fingers on it for yeah indefinite amount of time but it's hot and of course these are thick wires the the blue ones so they don't do anything so as a comparison uh the digital thermometer which is inside that tank says 34 degrees here in the water and this thermometer tells us 32 degrees so there is like two degrees difference but that's uh for me it's an acceptable difference but now what i should do is we should wait for let's say 15 minutes and after 15 minutes i will check back and tell you all the temperatures and we will see how good this thing can keep up with the generated heat so let's check back in 15 minutes so let's check what we have after 15 minutes as you can see the current dropped down because the temperature of the unit increased and that is also visible on the coil side temperature of the patio cooler because from roughly -7 degrees it went up to minus two point two degrees celsius so that's very bad we lost five degrees and then what i can also tell you is that uh i changed this thing a little bit and on the back side of this so on the other heatsink i squeezed in one of the digital thermometers and now that is showing us 44.7 degrees and that is relatively close to the temperature two which is uh the same line of water here and it's measured here so that is 42.5 let's say so it is more or less close it's a different measurement techniques because this is a digital thermometer here and that is an analog it's an ntc type of thermometer so we can say that our inlet temperature here so the water temperature before entering the cooling system it's roughly 43 degrees let's say and then after it leaves that based on this guy here another ntc it is roughly 40 degrees so let's say we have three degrees drop which is very bad and then here the digital thermometer says 43 degrees so again these two techniques are a bit different in terms of accuracy and precision i don't know which one to believe but let's say that the average of them is the truth and therefore that also shows like two three degrees drop between the hot side and [Music] the cooled water so that's not so good and then what i can also tell you is the room temperature is 25.5 degrees maybe it's a bit lower because now i was close to this uh unit here i was measuring the room temperature here and that might be something different but what i can tell you from this experiment is that i think that the temperature drop between the inlet and the outlet of this radiator is just two three degrees and that's not sufficient and i think i know what to blame here and that is defense because the fans are generating quite low airflow basically i cannot really feel it so i think in the next video i will test this system again with the better fans either i replace this with more eight centimeter fans because they they produce more airflow or i just replace with two 12 centimeter fans but at this time i will use my high rpm fans so they create quite a vigorous airflow and if i repeat the same experiment i could maybe expect some better numbers for example a better temperature drop in the radiator so the purpose of this experiment was to see how this system can work and also i wanted to demonstrate you a much cheaper system for water cooling i think this is much better than than the other system in terms of capacity for example also it is more silent the only noise which is generated by that pump is that it's caused by the table so it's touching the table and it causes vibrations but if i remove it you can barely hear anything i put it back and now you hear the vibration but if it's uh not touching any kind of surfaces or we have some kind of uh rubber in between the surface and the bottom of the pump then you are 100 sure that it is no there is no noise generated so now you hear the noise of this thing but i can show you that if you put something in between the surface of the table and the bottom of that pump you just get rid of all the noises so it's much less audible now so yeah i wanted to demonstrate you this system i wanted to show you this kind of thermometer here and i just wanted to show you how the temperatures are changing when you put significant amount of heat into the system so now i concluded that the fans are not so powerful so since we have these poor fans regarding their performance we don't have sufficient airflow in between the fins of this cooler or radiator therefore we cannot uh create more significant temperature drop between the inlet and the outlet and i think that this can be improved by a better fan configuration so i will try that in the next video but i think i could demonstrate this to you that you can build a quiet nice cooling system with very cheap components so basically you just have to buy some hoses that tank plus pump integrated thingy and then you have to buy this uh radiator which is much better and much bigger than the other radiator which is like a dedicated radiator for a pc for gpu or cpu cooling and yeah so basically this was the video it was more like an experimental and demonstrative video i hope you learned something i hope that this was useful to you and you can for example use the knowledge for the ntc thermistors or you can use the knowledge by knowing about this cooler i just stumbled upon this uh cooler by chance so i did not know that you can sort of recycle car parts in such a good way so for me this is very good and uh yeah so i will put all the details on my website as well so don't forget to visit curiousscientist.tech for all the parts and extra information always read the description of the video please because i see that a lot of people are not reading the description and they are demanding everything in the comments but everything is already given in the description so please read it and don't forget to subscribe if you have any questions or want to discuss something then please leave a comment and see you in the next video

Channel: Curious Scientist

Views: 128,074

Keywords: water cooler, water cooling, peltier, peltier cooler, peltier cooling, thermoelectric cooler, thermoelectric device, radiator, oil cooler, car part, car cooler, cpu cooler, gpu cooler, water radiator, water pump, pump, tank, temperature, thermometer, psu, power supply, fan, airflow, experiment, measurement, tec12715, heatsink, heat, thermodynamics

Id: 760qWkUTlp8

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020