- I freaking knew that is what gonna happen.
It is so bloody hot in the server room,
here in my new house.
It's a confined space.
It's insulated to keep all the noise away
from the rest of the house.
And it is chalk full of computers.
And the worst part
is that this ain't even the half of it.
We're gonna add five more systems
for the LAN gaming room.
- At least. - Maybe another one.
Yeah, maybe another one for the family room.
And when that happens,
if anyone has the audacity
to actually game on these machines.
They're going to (beep) cook.
- Now here's the thing.
We have cooling in here.
This is an HVAC system.
We got air conditioning.
- But that would be crazy.
This heat isn't worthless,
it's energy.
And when there are so many parts
of this house that require hot water.
Like the hot water faucets
or the in floor heating.
Why would I pay money to generate heat
and then pay extra money to get rid of it?
Jake and I came up with a devious plan.
Using those pipes right there.
We are going to carry the heat
away from this server rack.
And dump it in the pool.
But the way we're gonna do it,
is a little different.
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We've got two main problems to solve.
One is how to transport that thermal energy
from the server room,
to the pool efficiently enough.
That we aren't just losing it all
to the environment around us.
And two is how to dump that thermal energy
into the pool water.
Now the simplest way on the surface,
would be to just plumb an extra couple of pipes in.
And use the pool water as a gigantic reservoir.
But this raises some serious issues.
First and foremost is that pool water is fricking nasty.
Imagine if you will,
a micro fin arrangement like this.
But full of dead skin cell goo, hair,
bits of leaves and birds (beep).
Gross.
And it gets even worse.
PC water cooling components contain all manner
of different materials.
In this system alone.
We've got PETG, copper, nickel
and rubber in the O-rings that seal everything up.
So even if I could filter out all of the debris.
I'd still be running a very high risk of a reaction
between all those materials and the chlorine,
and other chemicals that are added to pool water.
A risk we don't have to take.
I'm going to walk you through our original plan.
These pipes from the server room,
we're gonna run into a heat exchanger.
And when I say heat exchanger,
you probably think of one of these.
Which is designed to take hot water.
And dissipate that heat to the surrounding air.
But there's a different kind of heat exchanger
called a fluid heat exchanger.
Where what you're actually doing
is you're taking one cold fluid
and one hot fluid,
and exchanging heat between them.
They're super cool,
and actually really affordable.
Unfortunately, this one's made of steel.
Which, it's gonna be a problem for,
well, everything.
(Linus laughs)
The good news,
is that you can get heat exchangers
made out of more exotic materials.
Including titanium,
which would've been perfect for our application.
So easy peasy, right?
You got your fresh distilled water
going back to the server room here.
You got your heat exchanger right here.
You got your trench down to the pool.
Cold side, hot side.
Bob's your uncle.
You're done.
At least that's what I thought,
until I talk to the pool contractors.
I'm going,
"Okay, your existing filtration system in the pool house.
I wanna plumb in the heat from the solar panels
and the heat from the server room.
And it's all like integrated in intelligently switches."
And they looked at me and they're like,
"What?"
Which led me to a truly big brain idea.
If pool water is causing all of my problems.
Corroding my computers,
or adding filtration complexity
to my dual loop, heat exchanger concept.
Why don't I not pump it at all?
I'll just take my fresh water,
completely closed loop system.
Plumb it into a more traditional radiator,
and then just let the water passively exchange heat
with the fins.
They haven't even poured the concrete yet.
So I could do like a little alcove or something.
Put bars on it,
so that, you know
nobody accidentally sticks their foot in it.
It'd be freaking perfect.
I mean, sort of perfect.
That's pretty janky.
Which is when I had a brain flash,
and my brain went from big to galaxy.
Remember when I showed you guys the in floor
hydraulic heating system here at the new house.
You probably see where I'm going with this.
If I can use one of these to heat up water,
run it through plastic tubes
encased in concrete,
and heat up the air.
Well then surely
I could do the same thing in water, right?
The plan then is to have our plumber,
who actually says he's done something like this before.
- Really?
- Take, yeah, I know, right?
Take PVC tubing and run it inside the rebar.
Once that's done.
The way they apply concrete to these
is not actually to put a mold down and pour it.
They actually shoot it.
Like someone's got a big hose on their shoulder
and then someone else is feeding.
Yeah, it's called shotcrete.
So once that's done,
our tubes will be completely encased in the concrete,
which is where this guy comes in.
Because getting all of these separate systems
to work together.
Requires temperature sensors, relays, valves.
- Yeah.
So it's gonna get a little complicated
when we have three heat sources at this point.
And one of the heat sources is the server room.
We actually have to make sure
it doesn't get too hot, right?
We don't want - Yeah.
the computers overheating.
- Here's the plan.
We're gonna do two separate loops.
- Yeah.
- The roof is gonna go into the walls.
Conveniently, I already ask for extra insulation
on the pool.
Apparently they don't normally put foam in here.
- Is it just that just cause we have such a
moderate climate? - Yeah.
It doesn't really leak out the sides.
So we already have extra insulation.
Which means that our heating loop,
the really hot one.
Is going to not lose too much heat that way.
It should mostly go into the pool.
Then we're gonna do a second loop in the bottom.
So the server room is mostly just going to be
about cooling the water.
And less about heating the pool.
- Right, hopefully we can cool it enough
that we basically don't have to use external radiators.
Although we'll have them just in case.
- So this would be hot,
no matter which way it goes.
In the event that the pool is drained,
we would have our cold come back from the radiator.
Now, what do you, what are these?
- [Jake] Servers also go bur.
- Oh, that makes sense.
(Jake groans)
- Alex usually does a better job of these.
(Jake laughs)
- Basically we've got two independent loops.
Number one is taking heat from the sun,
using it to heat up the water in the solar panels.
Which incidentally makes them run more efficiently.
- And they make electricity.
- Water cooled solar panels.
So we've got the hot water from that,
that runs to this pump.
Which is running on a relay
that is triggered by the temperature
of the pool water.
You've got your hot water going into this loop
that goes around the walls of the pool.
And then cold goes back up to the solar panels.
Nice.
Then going into the floor of the pool.
We've got our cold water
going to a check valve.
To make sure that this never runs in reverse.
- It doesn't back flow.
- That would be super terrible.
- [Jake] Especially because we have two zones.
- Cold water comes into our server
and there are a number of different ways
that we can tackle this.
Jake and I have talked about everything
from running individual water blocks to the machines
with just a big manifold on the wall.
To doing one of those big water cooled doors
like they have at SFU.
So that takes just the hot air from the room,
exchanges it with
this cold water. - What's cold?
The water doesn't even need to be that cold.
- That would probably be the best way to do it.
- Yeah.
- Anyway, we heat up the water somehow.
It goes to this pump
which will run all the time.
Unless I need to perform maintenance.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Pump in here or pump out there?
- Probably just put it in here,
and then we can put it on battery backup too.
Because the servers can't be on and the pump off.
Unless it's a cold door.
If it's a cold door, that's fine.
- Glad we thought of that.
Okay.
- Yes, so inside.
- Then we've actually got a tee here.
- Oh jeez. - So it'll go
one of two ways.
If the pool is calling for heat,
then it will go to the pool.
And this one would be our priority.
We want to dump all of our pool heat
in from this one.
- Yeah.
- Then if the pool is not calling for heat,
it can actually kick in this additional radiator.
So this is not really a one or the other.
This is a,
this or this and this.
Do you have a way to get water?
- Oh yeah, right there.
- Oh hi.
- Need a hose though.
- Yeah, no. - Need a hose?
- We could probably use that one.
We tried to get it out of here.
We're going to end up doing
like a wet t-shirt contest here.
Speaking of which,
this t-shirt's available.
LTTstore.com.
(faucet running)
- [Jake] We could just walk over to the sink, you know?
- Yeah, I could.
Wait.
Oh, oh crap.
Yeah, it's probably actually not best
to introduce a bunch of air into that loop.
- [Jake] He's not breaking things.
I swear.
- [Contractor] This probably isn't the best time
for me to tell you that there's an insurance lady.
- [Linus] Insurance?
- [Contractor] Who's here to do a walkthrough.
- You saw nothing.
Hey look, it's not leaking Andy.
That's good.
Pardon me.
Coming through.
It's some good pressure.
Some thick pumping right there.
- We just need some kind of temperature sensor
in the water.
- This isn't a temperature sensor.
This is actually a water leak sensor.
But we're just gonna pretend
like it's a temperature sensor
because look.
Oh that water's really hot.
- It's pretty juicy, spicy hot water.
- Ah there you go.
Pump turned on.
We got our radiators. - There we go.
- It's getting nice and cool.
You'll probably have noticed
that this is kind of similar
to the hydraulic heating system in the house, right?
- Yeah. - We just have two zones,
one for the radiator and one for the pool.
We could totally use a system like this.
Valves just like this, with like a manifold.
And this would be pool.
And this one would be radiator.
- Well, that's the thing that made me think,
"Oh this isn't such a crazy idea after all."
Because we're not reinventing the wheel.
This is a wheel that is extremely well established
and reliable.
- There's gotta be like two zone manifold,
you can get.
- I wouldn't even be surprised
if they just like custom make these.
- And you know what?
They have four leads on there.
Two of them are for opening and closing the valve.
But the other two
are to send a signal to something.
So rather than like having to smart control the pump.
You could just take those two leads
to trigger the pump.
And then it's like analog.
So if that valve's open,
it turns on the pump.
That's the same system we use here for the boiler.
There's no electrical control of the boiler.
It's just using that.
- So this isn't the most compelling demo ever.
But come on guys,
the pool's not even built.
What do you expect?
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So you can learn more about the H7 series
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If you guys enjoy this video,
maybe check out the one
where we did the solar panel install.
Or actually they could do the one
where we did the demo with the smart controlled ducts
for the air conditioning.