In our last pool cooling update, we got to the point where everything was working well enough, actually more than well enough. The performance was absolutely great until everything hit the fan. This pipe fitting cracked. Well, the flex tape isn't working. The glorious bucket reservoir leaked. And as predicted, some of that gravel from the piping did end up in my water blocks, but none of that was the killer. The killer was this. What happened to that tube? That is a very interesting story indeed
. One that killed the motherboard in my gaming system and the one in the server under it. It started when we accidentally unplugged the pump while working on the Sonos audio wall, continued when the over temperature protection on my system didn't kick in and ended when my aesthetically pleasing but highly conductive metal CPU block transferred so much heat into my tubing that it deformed causing a catastrophic leak. Don't ask me how, because I'll never be able to explain it, but the water leaked
out of the CPU block corroding my gaming motherboard, bypassing Yvonne's system and the server under hers, making it all the way to the fourth system down in the rack corroding this board here, here, here, here, basically everywhere. The good news is we have a plan. And by the end of this video, we are going to have a professional grade plumbing system set up. Not because he's helping. Hey, because we brought in a professional plumber and we brought in this segue to our sponsor. Cable mod, thei
r new stealth sense cables eliminate the need for sense wires, which means no more fragile pins in your cables that disconnect at the slightest insult. Like, I don't know, buffing head. It's barely even offensive. Learn more at the end of the video. The setup we showed you guys last time was really simple. We take heated water from the computers in the rack. We pump it out to the pool where there's coils of this tubing embedded in the walls and the floor. All that thermal energy gets dumped into
the pool. And then we pump the cold water back in here over to the rack. Unfortunately, that setup had quite a few problems. I was hoping that a simple filter would be enough to prevent our water blocks from getting gunked up. But the bad news about that is water blocks have extremely fine fins. So in order for us to have a filter that would remove enough of the crud from the loop, it would have to be so fine that it would destroy our flow rates, which could hurt our cooling performance. So ins
tead, we did what we should have done in the first place and installed a titanium heat exchanger. That makes the loop more complicated, but also makes it way more reliable. So instead of dumping our heat into the pool, taking that cold water and running it all the way to the server rack, we take it here to pump reservoir. Ah, yes. To the heat exchanger where that cold water doesn't physically mix, but exchanges heat with the hot water from the server rack, cooling it off where it can be recircul
ated, all inside, all clean style. Our next big improvement is our reservoirs. These are actually RV freshwater reservoirs that come entirely sealed, leaving you with a blank canvas to jigsaw the holes that you like. So on the top, we have an access slash fill hatch. Then on the sides, we've added bulkhead fittings for inlet, outlet, and a drain. The pool side also gets an upgraded pump since the old one was really struggling. It's a quality pump. It's just that it's a really long loop. But enou
gh chitchat. After Jake and his stepdad Dan spent the better part of yesterday getting the pool side hooked up, I'm sure they want to know if it works. All we got to do is plug in the power, which is ah, oh, oh good. Not janky at all. Thank you, Alex. In all seriousness though, hacking the end off of a power cable and then just using the conductors inside it is not actually jank. It's totally fine. Please look up the proper color coding in your region before trying to do anything like this. Yeah
, it's completely different in Australia and New Zealand because reasons. All we gotta do is plug it in. A flow indicator might've been not a terrible idea. Well, that was anticlimactic. This is supposed to be a self-priming pump, but this is also a pretty chonky loop. So we're gonna do it the way we originally planned, sort of, by just turning this around so that the water is gravity fed into the pump from the reservoir up here. Time for our second attempt. You guys are on the spigot. All right
, here we go. What? The easiest way to tell if it's working is gonna be if we're getting some air glugs from this boy, I guess. We are. Yes, we are. I can feel them. Once it really starts filling, this is gonna turn a shade of green because there's glycol in this loop to keep it from freezing in the winter. I don't wanna have to drain this thing or pain in the butt. Hey, I heard some glugs there. All right, cool. Alex, I think this is just working. No, it's just- It's green. All right. Hey, that
went great. Now to do it again. Looking outside, none of our fittings are leaking anymore, which is awesome. And the setup is exactly what I planned on doing last time, but the plumbing supply store just screwed it up and I got the wrong fittings. Anyway, what's also different is that we're now using this red PEX tubing instead of the white stuff that I had before. This stuff right here is fine for most of your house plumbing needs, but you want to use this red stuff for closed loop systems. Th
at's because this red barrier on the outside prevents oxygen from getting in or out. This is awesome for a closed loop system because once you have a little bit of corrosion, it will oxidize a little bit, but this will prevent more oxygen from getting into your system and allowing that corrosion to continue. It also prevents you from just having to like top it up as air gets into your closed loop. Excellent. And speaking of converting all of it to red PEX tubing, I get to undo all of the work th
at I did in here last time and change it all back into red PEX tubing. To distribute the water to the different systems, we bought these manifolds right here off of McMasterCarr. The idea is inlet, inlet on each side. Then you have all of these outlets and we just plug the ones that we don't need. Only thing is though, Jake bought these plastic manifolds and they're really easy to screw up. NPT has a tapered thread, which means that it doesn't quite go in correctly all the time. So if you have s
teel into plastic, you can very easily just completely screw up the plastic. Let's see if I did. Here's my incredible test setup. We have a stopper, a hose connection, and all of these plugged. I'm quite sure that both of these ends are going to leak because there's no Teflon tape on them, but as long as these don't leak, we're good. Yep. Leaking there, leaking there, but no leaking in here. That one's good. All right, second one. I'm slightly concerned about this guy right here because I know t
hat I for sure cross-threaded that one, but hopefully it's fine and it's not. Right there, hmm. Well, that's bad. Solution incoming. Oh geez, you don't need to get this, Andrew. Just turn it off. No one wants to see this happening. Oh God, that's wretched. All right, we've got our silicone manifold here. I'd give this about a 4% chance of working, something like that. Huh, it's not leaking. I can't believe it. For each side of the manifold, we want these T-junctions, and to clean it all up, we'r
e just going to attach them straight to the ceiling. Well, there is no ceiling. So to this board, which I have just cut, and hopefully it just, oh, ah, ha ha! Ha ha, friction fit. Love it. If you want a joint like this to not leak, you're going to need some Teflon tape. Now, in the past, I have just, I've used way too much compute, figuring out which way you have to put the stuff around, because you put it on the wrong way, you thread it in and it gets all mushed up. Anyway, Dan taught me how to
do it correctly. So you hold it like so. In your left hand, you hold the thing up like this, go on the back side, and hold it with your thumb, hold it with your finger, hold it with your thumb, finger, thumb, ring. Wow. Now that the inside side is plumbed up, we're ready to open these bad boys up, and do a quick test before we actually connect any computers to it. Just make sure it's not going to start leaking all over the place. Before we do that though, I want to throw some hoses on here to m
ake sure that I am not just dumping water all over the floor. On this side, I won't need antifreeze because this water's never going outdoors. So all I need is some kind of bioside. I'm going to be using J. Crow's Lugol's Solution 2%. Basically it's iodine. So we'll just, I don't know, put some in. All right, hit it. Woo! Okay, while that goes, I guess nothing in theory would prevent us from firing up our pump. Uh, yeah, that'll kind of stay-ish, you know, right? Oh, I got it, I got it, I got it
. There. Now it's definitely going to hold this time. We're having a little bit of trouble getting the pump primed so I have an idea. I'm just going to stick my arm in there. I mean, iodine's good for the skin. And I'm just going to stick this tube right on the outlet of the reservoir, and then we'll try and force some water into the pump that way. No, no, we got this, don't worry. It's fine, it's fine. Okay, okay, no spigot now. Oh, there we go. Not the best way to do this, but if it's stupid a
nd it works, it's not stupid. This gives us nice clean water for the inside loop and, well, water. Anyway, I did actually leak test them. They're not going to spill water all over your stuff from these bits at least. I guess these tubes might not be as okay. Yeah, two worm drives might be the solution. One right snug up here and one here. Anyway, why I brought you in here, that's not even why we're here. We filled these with water. We did. And now we need to fill them not with water. Oh yeah, th
at's a good idea. Yeah, I think these just weren't tightened enough. Okay, well that was exciting. And we can just tape a rag in the middle if it starts leaking. Alex, did you mislabel every single one of these tubes? No. Well, you know that the arrow's there. Yeah. And this is where the water goes in. Yeah, and it also says in. Yeah, you labeled every single one of these in, but that's where the water goes out. Okay, do you want me to label out on this side and in on this side for all of them?
Like, it also says in on this side. No, that would be stupid. What if you just drew arrows? I could draw arrows if you want, but also- But you labeled every single side of everything. Yes, and it perfectly corresponds to the computers, which are also labeled in and out. Ah, you guys be the judge. Is this out or in? This entire side is out. I don't even know. Oh, right, the water flows that way. I even pointed in the wrong direction just looking at it. That's so confusing. No, it isn't. This is o
ut. You guys decide. What we can do in the meantime though, regardless of any of that, is pressure test this bad boy. So I'm kind of thinking we put the cap on the reservoir over there, pop this buddy on here, and just make sure that this thing holds pressure. Okay. This is gonna take a while. Yeah, this is gonna take some pumping. Oh, sick. I think it's holding. Oh, that's great news. Might be time to start filling systems into the rack. Sacrificial lamb, gonna be my rig. Okay. I'm gonna go fin
ish it up. I think it's held though. It's exactly where we left it. Yeah. Okay, here we go. Oh, I'm so excited. This is it. This is final deployment time. First system hookup, here we go. The keen eye among you might've noticed that my system does in fact still have a pump reservoir and radiator. That's in case I ever wanna operate it separate from the rest of the system. What are the odds this is going to go absolutely, ow, Perfectly? Yes. Okay, punch it. All right. Pump's on. Whoa, she's leaki
ng. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Where's it leaking? Whoa, it's everywhere. How is it leaking? Where's it going? Everywhere. Hold on, here's an idea. Yeah, we probably should have done that from the start. I actually don't think any water got in here. It just sprayed on the side of the rack. The point is right now, we've got one system hooked up and then we also have a bypass just because a CPU and a GPU block are extremely restrictive and that is a lot of pump. So it's going to create a high p
ressure environment in the loop unless we've got a bypass. But theoretically, with this bypass in place, I can power up my computer. I'm hitting it. Oh yeah, she's circulating. Hey, this is awesome. It's working. It's alive. Hey. We did it. We've got Fur Mark loaded up. We are at 37 degrees on the GPU. Under load. It's drawing 350 Watts right now. It does not care. This is a 7900 XTX. The pool system, the pool system works. It's flat. It doesn't move. It's rock solid. I can't believe it's just l
ike 38 degrees. It's nice when you have like a effectively infinite amount of heat sink. Yeah. Oh, it's immediately on. Cool. Wonderful. Okay, next. Well, I hooked up the iCRON dock, which is the USB over fiber dock on both sides. I'm not getting a light. The problem is there are so many potentials here. It could be those 12 volt to 24 volt upset things we have in the computers. It could be any connection in the fiber along the way being dirty and there's a fair number. It could be a lot of diff
erent things, but for now, I'm just going to keep on treading forward, getting the other computers working and then we'll worry about that. Okay, so this dock just doesn't have power. What is the problem? Hmm. The fuse is blown. That is a 25 amp fuse. So it can handle 10 amps and they put a 25 amp fuse. Also, why did it blow? Yeah, why did it blow? I don't know. I mean, we can put another fuse in there and just see, but actually I don't, I only have one extra fuse. Let's YOLO and try it. Oh my G
od. No, okay. Yeah, that was immediate. Okay, so something about this is not right. What's that? Something mad. Okay, computer seems fine. That's good, Jesus. I believe it is to do with this SATA adapter. Okay, the computer works, thank God. 16 plus hours of troubleshooting later. It's done. Ah, I'm so excited. Look how flipping sick this is. I mean, it is now. There was everything from missing screws to missing GPU retention to extra standoffs under one of the motherboards, but they're all fixe
d now. And not only that, the room is tidied. The cable management is incredible. Come check this out. I've got like braided sleeving on this one. Just gotta add a little bit here. Oh yeah, all the water whips. Look at this, exactly the right length. I can have one of these systems disconnected, slid out on the test bench for troubleshooting or BIOS updates or anything that's a little finicky with the fiber optic connections in like 45 seconds flat. And it's gonna get even better in here. Check
this out, just today. Ah, I got my custom length power cables for the top up here. So I'm gonna get rid of all these hangers. Ew. Oh no, oh shit, what the fuck? What just happened? Something just burned. I think that switch just lit on fire. Did you see that smoke? Wow, she's dead, Jim. What just happened to that Enterprise XG? Why did it light on fire? I don't know. The good news is we shot this out of order. So let's go to it working. All that's left now is to see it in action. Ah, it's actual
ly working. Do you hear that? No sound, no heat. I'm killing myself? Just disturbing things from your youngest daughter. There's definitely still some work to do. The undersides of these desks could use the LTT store cable management treatment. And in my perfect world, I would love to use DisplayPort wall plates. Guys, there was a note on my screen that said find the cavern. Rather than just run the cables directly up to the monitors. But as it is now, I am just thrilled to see this come to frui
tion after all this time and get these laptops off the desk, which have been kind of in the way. One of them is an engineering sample. One of them has that like weird eGPU thing that mostly works, but then except when it doesn't, desktops, man, wires. Yeah. I would have given absolutely anything for a setup like this when I was a kid. They've already gotten a lot of hours out of it, but because it's not working half the time, it's been really frustrating. Now, anytime we're ready to go, the syst
ems are ready to go. They're running flipping cool. And because they're powerful, we're not limited to just Minecraft Dungeons. Just like I'm not limited to telling you about our sponsor. And it's cooled by a pool. How cool is that? Cable mod. Their new StealthSense cables feature their exclusive StealthSense technology that eliminates the need for sense wires running between your GPU and your power supply. Instead, a hidden bridge signals to the GPU that the full 600 watts is available to be us
ed so that your chonky boy can get straight up juiced. This is all done without tiny fragile sense pins that can be easily dislodged leading to black screens or 100% fan utilization. I mean, you can't take out your nemesis mom underscore slayer underscore 69 with all of that going on. So get all of the gaming performance with higher reliability and cleaner aesthetics by checking out CableMod's StealthSense cables at the link down below. If you guys enjoyed this video, then huzzah! It was worth t
he two sleepless nights in a row. Kidding, that was for the kids. It was only partially for you guys. That was for your cable management OCD. Yeah, it was for me to deal with cable management. And there's another thing I need to deal with. Speaking of follow-up videos, we don't have any way of remotely powering them on and off. We have ideas though. So I'm thinking maybe we test all of them in one video and then we'll share it with you guys. See you there.
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