This is a little self serving and I'm sure I'll hear from all the critics... but I really dig this community, I'm the world's BIGGEST EVGA fan and it's too cool not to share.  I've ogled the pages of Popular mechanics since I was a kid but I really never dreamt I'd build anything myself that would make it to print - but it did in september.  Here's the backstory: I've been building liquid cooled computers for about as long as there has been kit to build them, just can't get enough. Back in 2006 I started building Henry - the 1st rig in my ModsRig profile.  Henry started in 2006 as a semi powerful media machine that I used a dodgy Thermaltake Bigwater kit to cool the CPU.  He had a quad core AMD Phenom and made some pretty serious heat when I was gaming or... anything really.  It made enough heat that I started thinking about how to use it for something other than running up my air conditioning bill.
 
When I bought and remodeled a house in ~2009 I got a little nuts.  I rigged a heat exchanger to preheat the hot water heater and plumbed my man cave with hydronic computer generated floor heat.  I also built a heat exchanger and sunk it under the foundation of the house so I could dump any extra heat I didn't need in the summer right into the ground.  That really worked like charm but I was only pushing about 700W of electricity through my rig and only recovering about 50% of that through the loop, not really enough to make a dent in the winter heating load.  And the thermaltake kit was really not up for the job.
 
So I went a little nuts and built a monster of a rig out of a ton of ASUS/AMD/EVGA and EKWB kit (sorry Koolance... we tried and failed). It'll pull 1600W fully loaded and makes some serious hot water. Once I got it together and started to put it through it's paces I was really hooked, so I took the last 2 years to optimize this thing to do combined heating and computing.  Along the way I melted a lot of watercooling kit and had to reengineer just about everything in the rig to withstand the unbelievable temperatures it hits.  I've replaced all the poly tubing with high temp silicon wrapped with coils to keep it from rupturing. I machined new brass covers for all 6 EK water blocks, because they started to warp and weep at about 160f.  And after melting the CPVC in my thermal storage system I re engineered the thing out of copper and steel as well as replacing the water I was using with some amazing phase change material (fatty acids and esters - think soap).
 
Once I had hardened the system so it would withstand extended jaunts above 160f, I had to split the loop and run the north/south bridge, RAM and the two liquid cooled AQUERO 6XTs on their own lower temperature system.  Now the primary loop will exit the rig at 200f and we've hit 190F in the thermal storage tanks - something I certainly thought was not possible when we started... and I'm sure many of you are going to tell me it's not.  The rig runs so hot that it makes steam across the GPUs.
 
I'm sure there will be plenty of folks to let me know that:

• won't/doesn't work - ie. I'm full of it
• is a lame idea - why on earth would you want to run a computer hot?? (there are actually very economic and environmental good reasons - we'll see if anyone wants to talk about them!)
• breaks the laws of thermodynamics - it doesn't, start here and I'll help out with specifics
• is a copycat of Microsoft, Cloud & Heat, Quarnot Computing or Nerdalize - it's not
• Popular Mechanics are idiots - Try New Scientist, Network World, New York Times, OZY or PRI.
• Kickstarter was a bad idea - yes, kickstarter was a bad idea. ;-)

 

 
Okay guys, I am stepping away from the computer for the weekend (it's my anniversary) so... let me have it!
 

Thats awesome dude Your rig is a work of art. Its always a good feeling to get recognition for the awesome stuff you did.

Very cool -  Always love Popular Mechanics & popular Science

Let you have it?!?!?!? I think that's amazing and proves that if you have the passion, tenacity, skills and, most importantly, the MONEY, you can do anything your mind can dream up. Great idea and fascinating execution with your rig. Theirs nothing wrong with Pop Mechanics, everyone here has grown up with it, for the most part, and was probably one of the pioneers of Tech magazines, so all must pay respect, imo. Anyway, grats to you on your achievement and still having a anniversary to celebrate, lol. :P   \m/

I have moved this thread to mods rigs as I felt the subject and thread is best served in that area.

Hi Guys, thanks for the responses!
 

RushXTC
wut

Yep... I mentioned it is not an easy thing to understand.  My small team and I are trying to stretch the status quo a bit and look at different operating and business models for computing.  I really haven't found an easy, elegant way of explaining it - yet.
 

nateman_doo
I dont get it.  I do everything i can to keep computers from being hot...and you desire to run everything hot just to heat your boiler?  
 
My PC cranking keeps my office nice and warm during the winter (and painful during the summer).  I have thought about venting my forge into my forced hot air duct work to re-capture some of the wasted heat... so I always dig recycling energy.

nateman_doo,
 
Not just to heat a boiler but, yes, we are working out solutions to run computers significantly hotter and harder to specifically create heat with computation.  That heat can be used for more than just running a boiler, we can power air conditioning and refrigeration as well.  Consider this: right now when you run your computer you likely run you air conditioner to keep it (and you) cool in the summer as well as running your heater in the winter to supply heat for the rest of the house.  Our hot water heaters run all the time and are the most stable thermal load in a typical house.  When we run these devices we are using the energy for one purpose - making heat/cold.
 
Computers are just about 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat. Other than the benefits you take out, (gaming/work) which are very hard to assign an energy value, and the energy embodied in the communications you send back to the internet it all turns into heat.  Think about it; the processors/memory/chips make heat, mechanical components like fans move air causing the molecules to collide creating friction (heat), lights emit heat and photons which then make heat when they collide with the case, the wall or some other object.  The same applies to any sound the computer makes... all converts to heat at some point.
 
Since the biggest loads in our houses currently run on heat (space and domestic hot water) or could be converted to run on heat (air conditioning and refrigeration) with existing technology, we could be getting two (or more) benefits out of the same energy that we are using to just run our heaters or computers today.  One or the other could happen for free, from an energy perspective, if we used computers to make the heat that runs our homes/businesses/economy.  Interestingly, the majority of our economy actually runs on heat, not electricity... but that is a far more confusing topic.
 
So, your gaming rig/laptop aren't going to make enough heat to have an impact so we aren't talking about converting your current computer to a super computer/heater that runs your house.  We are building high temperature, modular 2-4kW computing appliances that sit in the space your hot water heater sits today and performs computation that datacenters are currently doing to heat your house.  You would also have access to this high powered computer to do whatever you do with it or share/sell the compute power with your community.
 
 

Really interesting idea, and I can see where you are going with it.  In places like so cal, where we don't have winter and we barely have spring and fall, i'd almost suggest mounting this outside of the house so the sun helps to maintain the heat. 
So at a  home level how would you use the stored heat to fuel say, my AC?  Also, have you considered the scaling rates of power in some areas, I would imagine ti would be cost prohibitive.  That plus some solid solar and I think you could stay cool and be running on very little power.  Now, how much computer to I need to create the heat needed to run my AC low enough to turn my home, or at very least my bedroom and computer area down to the temp of the walk in beer fridge at Albertson's?

 
For a long time I've entertained the idea of building a rig inside a mini-fridge. Your machine is a total beast! A lot of work, very nice job.
 
 

nateman_doo
Interesting.  Figure computers are here to stay, so if you make parts that don't degrade under the heat and succumb to electron migration, you can use the heat for various thermodynamic properties, and play the video games your going to play anyway. 
 
 
Dave,  A friend of mine and I built a cooler (similar to a chiller) that involved mounting a radiator outside the house so instead of using a chiller (and the associated electricity costs) we used the cold northern NJ winter to keep the fluid cold.  But this was years ago.

The parts will surely degrade, the heat will easily cut the capacitor life in half, the processors can be managed.  We're looking at ways to harden the electronics.  
 
The model is to run the machine hard, sell the compute and replace the unit every two years. Our initial models look like about a year payback on the machine (in ideal circumstance) so you would end up with an economic reason to continue replacing the rig... just like a bitcoin miner. At the end of two years the wheels will be falling off - we would cross ship a new one and rebuild yours to send to someone else.
 
Good idea with the radiator; when I was doing some initial testing in the summer, before the thermal storage system, we built a commode cooler to get rid of the heat.  See the pictures, it's pretty self explanatory.  ;-)
 
 

wow love the concept/ idea and work. thinking outside the box .... wait there's a box??

Nice!  I actually bought that copy of Popular Mechanics a few weeks ago.  It was a cool read! 

Check out this relevant link:
https://youtu.be/B8bhGw4vUFE
Not a build but a test bench setup for efficiency.
 
Bret