Daft question, but won’t you still have warm water going back to your heat source, not cold? The return heat from a heating system is still pretty warm, so I fail to see how this is going to help to cool your servers...so you’d likely need an ac unit to chill before it goes back anyway.
I’m thinking places like google and amazon spend billions on keeping data centres cool and can’t imagine they have missed something as fundamental as this...maybe I’ve misinterpreted what you are doing but good luck anyway.
i hAve a 15000L koi pond that the water flows through before going back to my heat sinks that removes any excess heat and takes the water back down to ambient levels of 25c even in summer colder in winter
cooling water is much more efficient than cooling air due to the heat capacity and the thermal transfer ability of water.
to be more efficient sometimes it is not about using a technology that is more efficient although I personally think this is more efficient than AC but about using things you already have to your advantage.
so my koi pond has a 36000 lph water stream it’s long and narrow creating a fast flow river type pond with a waterfall that drops 1.3m straight down.
A stainless steel pipe laid on the bottom of the pond will pass the heat from the radiators into the water. But due to my pond size, and the fast flow it already has the efficiency of that transfer will be significantly improved.
Due to the large waterfall I already have the pond will not heat up from this as the amount of evaporative cooling going on.
I also have fresh water going into the pond from a local water stream and it overflows around 300l a day. So a lot of the excess heat is evaporated or sent downstream.
I spend 100s a month of paying for my heating to be turned on. But also hundreds in electricity for my servers which create heat - which is a bit dumb. So I aim to create the system to transfer this heat to my underfloor heating in my house and then any left over heat on the return line goes through the pond.
So by doing this in the winter I manage to keep my pond from freezing which is nice a nice bonus for the fish, i heat my house and reduce heating bills, and reduce electric usage on AC usage
In summer I can close the manifolds on my underfloor heating and send the water directly to my pond which even in the hottest day’s of summer never gets above 25c so the water in the return will always get back down to 25c which is more than cold enough to absorb heat and repeat the cycle.
This links back to why I wanted 50mm x 50mm pipe so that I could have enough water in the system so that the water can heat from 25c -32c within around 30 minutes so the pump can be thermostatically controlled to turn on when water reaches 32 and turn off when it’s 25c. Otherwise in winter with the pump on 24/7 water temp willl get down to 5c and due to it being below the dew point water will flood my electrical components due to condensation
Last edited: