Water cooled cob setup?

Big Green Thumb

Well-Known Member
Those pics are during testing for leaks, not yet wired up. You can see the ends where I used the heat shrink to attach the 90* barb fittings. Pretty simple and it will soon get 2 more cobs and probably another row of 3 along with a bigger driver to run 9 at 1400ma.

And no that isn't me in the pics! LOL. That's my lovely assistant.
 
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Rolla J

Well-Known Member
Dope shyt Bro. Thats a badass light! I wanted to build one like that but previously drilled a couple holes in my alum sq stock so i ended up running vinyl tubing snugly through it. Still works pretty good. Use to not be able to touch the square stock and now i can touch it for over 20 secs with it being watercooled. Makes a huge difference. Im running 36 x 10w 3200k cob leds
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Big Green Thumb

Well-Known Member
If you still want to run water through the aluminum square tubing without the hose, get some of the adhesive lined heat shrink and put it over the holes. It is water proof at the pressure I am running at (basically 0psi).
 

Organic Miner

Well-Known Member
Those pics are during testing for leaks, not yet wired up. You can see the ends where I used the heat shrink to attach the 90* barb fittings. Pretty simple and it will soon get 2 more cobs and probably another row of 3 along with a bigger driver to run 9 at 1400ma.

And no that isn't me in the pics! LOL. That's my lovely assistant.
Not quite sure whether you were showing the lights or those ! Lol.
 

Rolla J

Well-Known Member
If you still want to run water through the aluminum square tubing without the hose, get some of the adhesive lined heat shrink and put it over the holes. It is water proof at the pressure I am running at (basically 0psi).
Hhmm. Ima have to check that out. Awesome! My water reservoir is made out of a beer cooler with a 80mm intake fan with a 1000gph sub pump on low setting. I think the length of the whole circulation is about 10 feet of tubing. I use my ph meter to measure the water temp and havent had it anywhere above 76° fresh water for a few hours as cold as 55°-62°20170427_210351.jpg20170427_211501.jpg
 

nfhiggs

Well-Known Member
I was doing a lot with my chillers. The reason they were big was because I used them instead of standard AC units for environmental control. They were more efficient.

I'm thinking that active chilling of water cooled lighting is overkill.
I tend to agree - a decent sized water reservoir will hold a shit ton of heat, and evaporation will cool it quite effectively, given enough surface area.
 

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
I tend to agree - a decent sized water reservoir will hold a shit ton of heat, and evaporation will cool it quite effectively, given enough surface area.
If the top is open, blow a fan across the water's surface to take advantage of evaporative cooling. The warmer the water gets, the better it works.
 

DaveInCave

Well-Known Member
Very original DIY solution, I love it!
I've been considering a similar thing only with CNC milling the channels into the heatblock.
 

Big Green Thumb

Well-Known Member
Go to a junkyard and find a cheap used heater core or small radiator/fan setup from a motorcycle.

My grow box today hit 95 degrees before I realized it. The water temperature of my lights was 102. The plants look fine, but I will need to leave the door open until I can get a better inline fan. I also just 4 gallons of water in the freezer to put in the box tomorrow to help keep the temps down. Outside air temp was 110 today and supposed to be 115 by Monday. Yuck.
 

VegasWinner

Well-Known Member
cool., this is new to me,. can you give me an example?
refrigerators use compressors that maintain a set temperature range with high/lows switches, a chiller unit works from a set temperature and will run until the set temperature is maintained.

The difference is the chillier is by design a run time compressor, meaning it is designed to run all the time with sealed bearing made from non-metallic materials, that do not overheat adding to heat loads to reduce coefficient of friction, more expensive. While a refrigerator compressor unit is designed to maintain box temps for an insulated enclosed area, made with cheaper bearings that fail more quickly from heat stress,as the compressor is designed for limited run time.
 

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
I like your design and ingenuity and think I'd like to do something similar with some 1" square tubing made into cooling tubes and some 2 or 3" x 1" aluminum architectural "C" channel that costs about $2-$3/ foot where I live. I like the epoxy/ paste behind the COBs idea and the fact that screws can be used to mount COB holders. I think I'll try a strip of double sided CPU tape down the whole length of the tube and measure it's thermal performance with a few old cheap floodlight COBs. Alternately it should be possible to hold the tubing tight to the channel mechanically with spring steel wire or plates and holes drilled near the top sides of the 1" high channel and use regular heatsink paste down the entire length of the tube.

In any case, I'd like to scarf your photo for my thread, give you credit for the idea and provide a link to your thread for the original. Let me know with a message here, if I can use it, because I'd like to explore the idea further and would like to let folks know where the idea came from by showing the pic.
 

Big Green Thumb

Well-Known Member
You can do whatever you would like with the picture as long as it doesn't involve photoshop and/or gay porn.

To me, the best invention I have there is the adhesive lined heat shrink to attach the aluminum to the plastic fittings. If I was building another water cooled setup, I would do it with 1" square tubing without the flat strap. It would require larger diameter heat shrink but everything else would work the same.
 

mahiluana

Well-Known Member
You could lower the electricity usage by 10%.
:peace: (: - Sorry - I think that`s not true.
The minimum power that the refrigerator will need -
is the amount of heat power that you fill in.
And this can be ~ 60% of your electric input.

i.e. my watercooled 300W lamp * 18h * 60% = 3,24 KWh of heat power every day.
I put it in a heat exchanger and can use ~80L of hot water / day in the shower.



Also a cheap and electricity neutral way is to use a cooling tower in combination with the air
that you pull out of your grow room.

https://www.rollitup.org/t/diy-heat-exchanger-idea.936494/



This way you don`t have to spent additional electricity - but you need some water to vaporize.

To cool above 300W lamp you need ~ 5,4L / 3,24KWh to vaporize and add it every day to your cooling system.
bongsmilie
 
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ttystikk

Well-Known Member
:peace: (: - Sorry - I think that`s not true.
The minimum power that the refrigerator will need -
is the amount of heat power that you fill in.
And this can be ~ 60% of your electric input.

i.e. my watercooled 300W lamp * 18h * 60% = 3,24 KWh of heat power every day.
I put it in a heat exchanger and can use ~80L of hot water / day in the shower.



Also a cheap and electricity neutral way is to use a cooling tower in combination with the air
that you pull out of your grow room.

https://www.rollitup.org/t/diy-heat-exchanger-idea.936494/



This way you don`t have to spent additional electricity - but you need some water to vaporize.

To cool above 300W lamp you need ~ 5,4L / 3,24KWh to vaporize and add it every day to your cooling system.
bongsmilie
6 quarts of water a day is cheap.

I like how you think.
 

VegasWinner

Well-Known Member
I love it a water tower. reminds me of the power plant I use to run with CB boilers, GE chillers, waters towers, day tanks, evap coolers, etc.
 
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