Cloudy pipes?

[Ant]

I know a lot of you are using water cooled setups at home. I was just wondering what your water looks like after a few months and what stuff do you put in your water?

I notice with mine, after a few months the pipes go a cloudy white colour. The water looks clear in the res though still. So something is making my pipes go cloudy. The stuff I have in my water, is a couple drops of water wetter and a tiny drop of blue UV dye. Are they causing my pipes to go cloudy? (Its distilled water btw)

When its been cleaned out, it looks great, and the water in the pipes is transparent, but now it doesn't look so great.

Performance wise, its still really good, so seems unaffected.

Any ideas?

Cheers
Ant

[Lee H]

This could be contributed to a number of factors really and is hard to narrow down as a quick search on google threw up the following reasons ;

the tubing quality
organic growth in the water
calcium build-up from using hard water
use of low quality coolants

Hopefully these few maybe able to narrow down your problem and find the root cause.

[GAteKeeper]

Most likely its algee

stick 10% of anti-freeze in there. This will do 2 things one stop excess corrosion as well as being poisonous to life.

U will have to clean your pipes by draging some sort of cloth through them.

Corrosion - A definition

GK

[turkster]

Yeah I just changed my block and cleaned out the water from my water cooling system that had been running without change of water for 8 months or so . It had no additives and was just tap water. The water had a very light green/beige coloured cloudy (only slightly) look which was probably due to corrosion in the block. You can see the effect on the block in this thread.

In your case it is most likely biological growth/algae etc. The temp of your water makes a big difference to the rate of biological growth in the water. The cooler you can keep your water the less growth you get (unless your temps are over 50C). According to a friend of mine who is chemical engineer a difference of a few degrees between in water temp (around the 20s and 30s deg C) can make a massive difference in the rate of biological growth.

As Gatekeeper says to clean the pipes you can get something like a bit of jiffy cloth etc and tie it to a length of wire or string (an old guitar string is ideal) and then drag the cloth through the pipes.

[Ant]

Okay, cheers guys, I will look closely at what I put in next time, and see how it turns out!

I imagine its an ideal environment for algae as my water is always warm.

I changed all the piping a few months ago for the first time, and I ended up just replacing all the pipes as they were quite bad... Its not that bad now, but it is getting that way....

[Lee H]

What you will need to do is flush the system with an algae killeing solution so there are no little buggers hanging about the metal head on the water cooler.

The best thing to use in regards watercooling is pure water ( distilled ) but de-ionised water from halfords would just be as good.

You then need some algae stopping solution and a small amount of an EG ( ethylene glycol ) based anti-freeze to help with cooling and to stop the nasty critters coming back.

I was fortunate in that corsair bundle this eythlene gycol and algae inhabitor with their cooling units to help them stay fresh and clean

[PopUpPirate]

I guess you could flush the tubes with a bleach / water mix, and then use salt water afterwards?

[Ant]

Cool, I will look into that algae killer stuff and eg based antifreeze! Sounds like that could do the trick!

At the moment I am using de-ionised water from halfords, and only a little drop of water wetter, so maybe I should use a bit more anti freeze instead next time.

Am I right in saying water wetter isn't an anti freeze as such, but more of an additive to improve it? Or is that totally wrong?

[Daymonkey]

for algae stuff go to the local pool shop the stuff i use in my pool is great, no mingin algae scumm in the at all

[GAteKeeper]

Water wetter is like antifreeze but also lowers the surface tension for better heat transfer - smells bad too. Not much point unless U want uber cooling.

U wont need anti-algee with antifreeze as gylcols are really poisonous and will inhibit growth anyway. I wouldnt recomend bleach down your pipes - it will react with PVC ones and i am not sure but i think it turns silicon (Tygon/Clearflex) opaque. Just drag a cloth though on a string and give them a good rinse.

GAteKeeper

[Ant]

cheers for the advice dudes! Been a great help!