The bong tower

As an Aircon engineer, I'd suggest a few ways to make it work better. 1) Maximize the surface area per volume of fill material, you want as much surface area per unit volume to make it compact. This is probably some tournament worthy of another season. 2) Use a spray nozzles, the water droplets should be small to enhance heat transfer, use a mist eliminator if needed to avoid water droplets leaving through the fan. 3) Typical commercial cooling tower run at water-to-air ratio of 1.2 ~ 1.6 kg water /kg air. Try to build a relationships between a) Pump speed to water flow b) Fan Speed to airflow With the relationship known you can play around with water-to-air ratio to maximize your cooling performance.

Another idea might be to use an ultrasonic evaporator to force atomization and then recover moisture through adhesion to cooled surfaces.

Honestly, this is cool enough to be its own series

You should use these mist nozzles for garden hoses / shower heads. They should create tiny droplets and therefore a lot more surface area for evaporation. Also, to work with filters next time, you can try to have the fans at the bottom pushing up, with pressure-optimized fans, and just have filter material in front of the fans.

A liquid to liquid heat exchanger would be a really smart investment on this system so you don't bring that dust into the processor.

If you were getting no sleep before, leave it to the community to find a way for you to get less. Great video, you really put in the yards with your work and I for one appreciate it.

I'd love to see this idea expanded on yet again. More fill density (I get what you mean about the aesthetic side, but I think you could definitely cram more in before it starts to look like a solid lump), spray nozzles (which may require a stronger or secondary pump), and maybe additional fans for improved airflow (could do 4 fans arranged to form a cube that exhausts out of the sides). Also if you didn't do it already, probably a good idea to seal all the gaps with silicone, just to ensure that the fans are pulling all of the air from the bottom, not though any small gaps. Honestly, I think this is an interesting enough idea to explore further. It'd be cool to see what it could achieve with all you've learned from previous versions.

Make your connecting rings between the tubes also contain the rails on which the infill sits. Basically run three or four legs up and down from the connector rigs with ledges for the fill plates to sit on. You can also make the connector rings a fill plate in and of themselves. That way you have the connector ring is a fill plate Plus a fill plate both above and below each ring held in by those legends so they can't go anywhere.

Ever sense your first video over this tower cooler. It's stayed in my head for a very long time. Glad you have done another one

Might as well just build a wall fountain, At least esthetically it would be a lot nicer but might need to make it fairly large to be effective, and you'd have to deal with dust and keeping track of the water level. For an alternative material to put in the column you could use the sheets of material that go in swamp coolers, its designed to do this exact thing and you ca buy it at the hardware store.

I had a passively water-cooled gaming PC back in 2005ish. I think the cooler I used was the Zalman Reserator 1 V2, IIRC. It was basically a big external tower with fins running down the side to help dissipate heat. You should see if you can get one of those for when you decide to go for round three, I bet it could be fairly easily adapted to what you're trying to do.

Tech Ingredients channel have a good PVC dual stage evaporative cooler you might want to look into. Also, you're getting a fair bit of cooling from evaporation, so it would be interesting to know what the difference in coolant volume is both before and after testing.

can i just have like a 5 hour video of the water tower trickling? it's so soothing 😌

We used to do this back in the late 90s early 2000. We called it "bong" cooling. Works great, creates a humid atmosphere in you room. If you put a return pump(s) on the side at an angle you can get a really good vortex going that will increase the heat exchange. also try a shower head at the top. You need to make it taller and get the water from the showerhead to spray so it evaporates.

The simple fact that it worked is amazing to me. I'm sure with some work it could become a zen piece of furniture while fueling your epic gaming

Should get some of the metallic filament for the discs inside. Also you can try embedding magnets in them so you can adjust the positioning from the outside using more magnets.

This was very thoughtfully constructed and a ton of fun to watch, thank you!

Perhaps using raschig rings instead of those distribution plates would work better. It massively increases the surface area. You can easily find ceramic ones used for distilling. Or even print a whole load of them.

this actually could work for normal setup if you use a water to water heat exchanger to keep the evaporating water supply separate. Could be nice, like one of those desk fountains very tempting....

In the early 00's we just used 120mm PVC pipe with a Y piece on the bottom and an shower head on top, have the fan blow in air through the free arm of the split piece and you could achieve sub ambient water temperatures when running without load.

Ayyy, I'm so happy you ended up doing it, thank you!

Congrats on the new addition!

This reminds me somewhat of a bong chiller I made about 15 years ago that I had outside and plumbed into my house. The cooling results from a 8 foot bong chiller are phenomenal. :)

I hate how much I like this, more please.

These used to be called "bong coolers" and were used for cpu overclocking back in the pentium 3 and early Athlon days. With a 50-60w cpu, the shower head and pvc pipe type could cool the water below ambient and thus allow for what in those days was extreme overclocking. They were also relatively cheap back when dedicated PC radiators were rare and expensive. I think by about 2002 or so CPUs used enough power that they were no longer used much.

You might be able to just pack the entire tube with fibrous material that would allow a huge amount of surface area and slow flow. Just maybe put a "shower head" at the top to distribute the paths through the material.

Garden irrigation and cooling systems have a "misting" head that forms a fine spray. Combine that with the fan at the top, and you get something similar to a jet engine. Another option would have a water fountain at the base, and a series of condensation plates in the column. Water from the plates is recycled to the PC - looking a lot like a fractional distillation setup.

This is the chillest cooler I've ever seen

Used to play with these in the early 2000's. What you want is as small dropplets as possible spread as uniformly as possible and you want them to free fall against the airflow as long as possible. Designs back then where otherwise quite simple and similar, just a collecting reservoir on the bottom with pipe to the PC and pretty long and wide tube (I used to have 1,5m 300mm PVC tube as the "rain tube"). The top part is the difference, we didn't go for direct airflow because we used the very top to diffuse the water (1-4 pipes from the PC pushing water to small PVC pipes at the very top with holes on the under side and under them a diffusing layer that was just a PVC cap with a ton of small holes through which the water just barely dropped down to the pipe). I used to have 2 fans in their own pipes separating from the rain pipe to upwards to the sides so water couldn't be pulled into the fans directly. The true art came from tuning the fans. In the best case the airflow needed to be just rightly distributed so the dropplets don't get flown around in the pipe and hit each other and grow in size, so as stable and directly down to up as possible. The second part was the force of the airflow, you wanted just enough that the dropplets don't fall straight down but they fall slower because the airflow because the longer the dropplets fall, the colder they get. I would recall some people who put way too much time to it managing to get the water returning to the PC being subambient temperatures. But the whole thing fell to the history once someone found out you could just use a small intercooler and strap fans to it instead of this huge rain tower and we got closer to the modern watercooling (we were still cooler because having the cooler within a case is such a limitation, just drill couple holes to the back, get rubber grommets for them and bring the cooling outside, you can even dunk the cooler to a fishtank and water cool your water cooler).

Ah, this takes me back. I made a similar evaporative cooler with PVC plumbing pipe and scotch brite pads to hold the water and allow evaporation. I had it cooling a dual-CPU Athlon XP system. Had to refill it every day - it worked fairly well but wasn't that practical given how much water it went through. Yours is a lot more aesthetically-pleasing!

i kind of want more episodes of this where you tinker with everything :D Thanks for the update!

The key point here - hot media/cold air surface area size. You need to increase it at max possible level. So here is some strategies to reach it: 1. Make thin streams of water through small (up to 1...2mm nozzles). But it will may need pump with high enough compression (between PC and nozzles). 2. Make freefall water droplets. This will require more nozzles to achieve required flow. 3. (Most promise) Make your own radiator for controlled surface size at wide range of flow - push a water through an array of plastic tubes for drinks. It`s easy to calculate requried number of tubes for your application. Coz these tube has a very thin walls (0.15 - 0,30 microns) - high enough result heat conduction. Because it`s tube - easy streams and air control.

You can also filter the water by adding a 'resting pool' similar to Moors filtration technology used in Andalusia back in 15th (not sure when was that) century. It is basically a relatively large reservoir that has a certain depth and relatively high intake and outlet spots (for example 2cm radius ports work on top of a 14cm deep 25-30cm long pool). Idea is if you put your water flow thru a very deep reservoir, all the particles brought by the water will seep down and you can collect cleaned water from a high spot. Ideally you'll need a cleaning mechanism/scheme for the bottom end, if you make it open top like the original it will help with cooling and finally if you make it just right you can use it as a master waterfill/drainage reservoir as well. It'll take a lot of space, it'll be heavy and potentially messy but an absolute spectacle if you're up to tackle :)

Aquarium bio balls would probably work excellent to fill the tube

Way to think outside the box,... or case! I really like the idea of hearing flowing water versus flowing air, very zen 😇

Use a power station cooling tower as a model, spray heads at the top with upflowing air. If the droplets are small enough, you don't need anything in the column. And just filter the water with an in line filter. You can also put a grid just above the bottom of the pool to encourage sedimentation

you don't know how long I've waited for this

It's like a swamp cooler. That's what we had when we lived in dry Nebraska as a kid instead of refrigerant cooling like normal air conditioners.

What a fun video! I am happy it worked!

AQUARIUM TOUR PLEASE! Is it saltwater? fresh water? cichlids? marine? i have been watching your vids and had NO idea you where a fish guy too! i must see! Please! Also, Cool tower cooler man!

You should do a video on cleaning your loop, trying various things to flush it, and using a boroscope camera to get in up close to the parts we can't normally see, like down the fitting hole of a radiator. For instance, one of my ideas is to pour drain cleaner into the radiator, let it sit overnight, then flush with water until clear. Possibly other things as well, like Isopropyl alcohol and automotive paint solvents. Then move on to stuff that should be more compatible with the plastic and acrylic bits of your loop, once you think the radiator can't be cleaned any more.

I dont know why I like these somewhat overly complicated, intricate and/or unique water cooling ideas. Whether its due to the fact I want my pc to stand out a bit or just because its different I really want to go like way over the top with it one day and have a large tower like this that could sit next to the desk and look like its purely a decorative fountain. Although pumping could become an issue.

Tech Ingredients does a few videos on water-tower evaporative cooling. Almost the same idea with fans blowing air from the bottom up, into a shower head.

Hey love this concept has some merit for a TEC project I'm working on. Just a thought re your surface to water / air ratio, you might like to try a bunch of small plastic balls and just fill the towers with them. At a stab I would suggest approximately 15mm to 25mm diameter. Should aid the whole cooling process quite a bit 🙂.

This is pretty cool. Hope to see a v3 some day.

You actually inspired me with the original video to build a similar system, I decided to use a sort of "rain" shower head I had lying around and 2 clear 5 gallon buckets for mine though.

@Major Hardware for me the whole point of this Vapor cooling is - simplicity and only problem is sound. Your approach fix what is working and do nothing with problems. You have basically 2 solutions for PC Vapor cooling -> A. Use shower towel on a simple horizontal PVC tube with holes to spread the water by soaking and use couple of fans for cooling, B. Use simple shower head to spread the water on fully open air. Your more industrial approach have place in a very large scale, when volume of water in the system and whole scale of the system should be optimized to a reasonable scale, but you still have a PC water cooling that makes you want to pee all the time. Also there is C. option, to vaporize and condense water with sound waves, like Ultra sound, this is how electric air humidifiers work.

One way or another, you have inspired me...But 15 years ago I had a similar idea....mine is simpler though...But it is based on genius physicists' discoveries...But I stopped pursuing the idea...I will make it happen this time because we haven't overcome such a thing. I commend you for trying for making something not just talking. I didn't exactly measure parameters, but I achieved a dramatic difference, just life as a networks admin and a horrible divorce got me off track...All to say don't let anything stop you from improving your design, everybody has unique ideas and you are on the right track, cheers.

This is going to be an exciting series.

Coolingwater specialist here: to improve your design the only thing you need to do is increase the surface area. You could do this by printing a circular lamellafilter, which fits in the full length of your clear acrylic tube. More surface area equals more evaporation, upto a certain point of course.

Cool project, literally! Saw the hot glue gun and went: "Oh, no!" But now I have to pee...

Nice work!

that thermal dynamics module coming in clutch here

Love this! It sparks so much creativity in me 😀

That's some clean soldering there my friend. I don't give that compliment to any but the most deserving.

I very long time ago, I used I "Y" fitting on 4" pipe. 1.5' going down into a bucket and 3.5' going up in the air. Using a rain type of fitting for a kitchen sink at the top of the pipe and 3 92mm case fans stacked on top of each other connected at the "Y" fitting I was able to leverage evaporative cooling. This was all sitting in a 5 gallon bucket with a fountain pump cooling my Duron 900. Another way to increase your surface area is to use scotch bright pads(maybe you can find white ones), I actually enjoyed the rain cooler. Cool to see the same concept used twenty years later.

You Sir, Have some Serious talent.. 👏👏👏

Loved the experiment! Also the constructive criticism of the flaws discovered on your first design . How about if you lowered the bowl down in the duct ? I think the neck of the fish bowl would be small enough for air flow .

This thing amazes me.

Alright! The beard's making a comeback!!!

I remember people making coolers kinda similar to this 15-20 years ago with the water getting slightly cooler than ambient. It was constructed from just plain old grey pipe and shower head at the top and a 45 degree piece in the middle facing downwards with the fan blowing air through it on the water dropping past it all the way from the top to the bottom without any middle grills or anything.

This guy is really creative

return of the bong cooler

Hey, I didn't know you had a new baby. Congratulations man!

I was just about to research how to do a more efficient evaporative cooler for a project of mine. I plan on integrating your fill design with my cooling towers. Instead of an upper fan try using an aquarium air pump in a lower section of the tower. This way you have a positive displacement system, relatively speaking compared to a fan. If you plan on sticking with a fan suction design, use a fan designed for radiators.

This just needs to be a series of Build your own exotic water cooling set ups.

I love it. So many ways to design it and who cares how it cools when it looks that cool 😎

Wow! Your own cooling tower ! If I may, there is two kind of cooling tower and yours is a little bit in the middle in the wrong way. You have free fall cooling tower and packed cooling tower. Free fall cooling tower have less drag (air easily pass through), but the surface between air and water is not so great. The packed cooling tower need strong fan as there is a lot of drag. But the cooling is also better inside as the surface between air and water is better. As you use a PC fan, I recommand you to: - redesign the head to have a better spraying of water. What you want is a shower of small droplets. - remove all packing inside. - replace the fan for a high pressure one. Beware that the cooling effect depend of the relative humidity of the room. Pretty project through. Have fun !

That’s pretty cool. If there was two, especially in a gun metal like color, it would look like Dr. Frankenstein’s lab😂

This is so cool what an awesome idea

Imagine hooking up a water system to your entire house, where you can plug in many devices with quick fittings so you can water cool any device anywhere in your home using a big fountain type bubbler like this? That would be such a cool thing to see someone do.

Love the mad scientist vibe :)

Congratulations on the kid!!!!!!!!! Just wait for all the my old stone's stones 😁😁😁😁

thanks for amazing video❤

7:23 You know you're on the right track when you introduce the Sripol method

Very cool. I feel like this has potential to be quite effective with further refinement. It would be especially nice in places with dry air, since it would act almost like a desktop humidifier, and achieve better cooling via enhanced evaporation.

Wowowow soo cool!

I made one of these 20 years ago, but I went for attached flow to the walls of the pipe. I accomplished it by lining the walls of the pipe with one layer of cotton towels. Then I had a smaller pipe with a fan that went inside the big pipe, that way it could pull air down into the pipe and back up the smaller tube. It was quiet and cooled my AMD CPU. Downside is it used quite a bit of water and stuff would start to grown in the water, you might have to address those issues somehow.

Excellent work man. I’m impressed. I’d rather use that than radiators any day. I mean hell, I’m running 2-360’s with push/pull configs so 12 fans on the rads alone lol. The sound of a waterfall is much more preferable and calming than 12 fans lol.

A "rain" type shower head is what we used to use back in the 90's 🤣. Just a long 6 foot 8" PVC pipe ("reclaimed" from the junk yard for $5-10) with the shower head at the top, fan above, pump and all down below. Literally 30+ years ago this was how you beat the "heater core" people to ambient temperatures.

Fun idea. Use a window screen mesh to add surface area for the separation disks. Just mount them on top of the current stack disks. The finder mesh you use the more air pressure you will need. Possibly 2 fans on the top to pull out.

This video made me curious if you were the guy who put an EVO 212 or whatever it was in an acrylic case and water cooled it. And apparently yes, you were. Man it's cool to see how far you've come since then

sick bong man

I once had the idea of using one of these epoxy river/ waterfall- desks as part of my watercooling loop. But it probably wouldnt have looked pretty for long with hot water steaming up. I did build an evopartive cooler from a small jar that had a showerhead inside and a fan on top. Worked good as a temporary setup but I had to fill up the water level once a day.

This was really cool, I love wonky stuff like this. Imagine a large sized one of these cooling a whole room of computers. You'd have to be dedicated to the water trickle sound though, unless you found some way to mitigate it where the water drops into the base below (Where I assume most the sound comes from)

Just wanted to say, great work on becoming a better, healthier, you. Pretty inspiring, and perhaps I need to take your lead and make the change myself. Good day sir.

I kept looking at this and thinking "why not just use a rain wall instead"? You could easily put a rain wall in an enclosure (like a fish tank or plexiglass box) and then add a filtered intake fan and a fan for exhaust. You'd get plenty of evaporative cooling, filtered air and a lot less parts.

This seems like it would a) be a neat humidifier / heater in the winter and b) something my can will be unable to resist drinking from

G'day Major, Along with the Fan Showdown I love these "caraaazzzy ideas" videos, it is Awesome the way you get everyone involved in the channel content, rather than just telling us "I did this". WOW! compared to a regular loop it is also really 'cool' & I guess if you like those calming fountains it would be great knowing your fountain also has a PC Purpose, but me even for the short running time 😬I had to stop the video to go for a bathroom stop😂, 🤔some thoughts to help longevity shorter clear tower tubes (same overall height but 6 or 9 instead of 3) with the Fill pieces integrated into the joiners, maybe a straight sided bowl at the bottom to hold the same amount of water but lower the Water level to prevent splashing the air filter.

I remember reading about this is an old PC magazine in the early 2000's I think. They used a shower head to split the water up in to smaller dropets & increase surface area to maximise evaporation.

Long time follower, first time commenter 😅, after watching this video I had some suggestions for vas improvement for both air flow and water distribution. Have you considered trying the “print on fabric” technique with a mesh or micro fishnet? You could easily have stacked rings of various mesh and netting all from a simple trip to the screening section of a hardware store. All consider adding leg to your filters to act as guides and supports to build your tower. Cheers and great success!!!

Needs a version 2, cooling towers are so cool.

I wonder if this could be done entirely passively like in real power plant cooling towers. hot water is dispensed at the bottom and spread out. That heats the air inside, which rises and naturally causes a good bit of draft cooling the water. This, if you make the water spreading out silent, could be the most silent cooler in PCs

You should print spacers to go between the elements to keep them flat/level. It would be awesome to see at least the top distribution plate have a rotating element, powered by the weight of the falling water. That would take some design work, but maybe a hydraulic bearing system would give an load capability on the bearing proportional to the water flow since it would power the bearing. I've seen a bearing/motor design in higher pressure systems, so I don't know how effective it would be here. But it might be worth a look.

For a very long time I suffered from the same ideas and their implementation. 1 to increase the area from which evaporation takes place, I used a bunch of different straws for cocktails, in my case 6 mm showed the best result 2 geotextile was used to filter the air - it is very similar to the material of vacuum cleaner bags 3 I used sponges for aquariums to filter water, it also made the sound of falling water drops quieter if the water level was lower than the top of the sponge 4 I used a channel fan and in order to avoid contact with water, the air supply was from below 5 since the circuit is open, the tank needs a huge one so that all the water can drain there, well, you need a powerful pump so that you can pump everything back, or you need a check valve(near exit) that creates a decent resistance in the circuit

The best Evaporative cooling is done with Spray bars Atomizing the water makes it way more efficient

Back in the day when we made these out of PVC pipe we used off the shelf shower heads at the top

Chemical engineer here. Use thin, low density scrub pads on each layer. Surface area will increase by an order of magnitude.

I like how you made it red white and blue. 'MERIKA!