View Full Version : Dead Thermochill PA120.1 - what to do
Got a Thermochill PA120.1
She's KO'd, dead, i can't fix it.
Basicly it blew open, the base with the bleed screw has come off, ie 2 parts now.
No idea why, pump i was using was an RD30 with bowed D-tek Fusion.
Think i can get my money back off Thermochill, replacment?
I'll get photos tomrrow.
Pretty random though, water gushed everwhere!
Xilikon
03-27-2008, 02:32 PM
:rofl: never heard of a dead radiator :rotf:
I guess it's a bad soldering job missed by the QA dept (if they exist) :rolleyes:
LogAn'sRun
03-27-2008, 02:42 PM
wow, me neither.
PM marci or check out there forums and see what they say?
There forum is dead, OC-UK is a dead place to be. Once i got photos will mail him. I personly want a refund
LogAn'sRun
03-27-2008, 09:58 PM
LOL, is OC-UK dead now? I used to lurk there for a like a year, and then kind of just moved on. . .
sad
Martinm210
03-27-2008, 10:12 PM
Wow, the RD-30 is a bigger beast than I thought. If the rad is before the block, it's going to get the brunt of the pressure.
I'm impressed!!!
starlon
03-27-2008, 11:11 PM
Damn... That's one powerful pump!
NaeKuh
03-27-2008, 11:36 PM
Got a Thermochill PA120.1
Basicly it blew open, the base with the bleed screw has come off, ie 2 parts now.
No idea why,pump i was using was an RD30 with bowed D-tek Fusion.
Think i can get my money back off Thermochill, replacment?
I'll get photos tomrrow.
Pretty random though, water gushed everwhere!
LOL how the hell did you blow that thing open? Martin is 14.66psi even enough to do something like that? If it is... yikes is right.
I didn't even have the QX9770 ES C1 clocked that much or vcore so it was all to do with heat
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v604/corsapete/P3280091.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v604/corsapete/P3280093.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v604/corsapete/P3280095.jpg
I could probs fix it by using my brazing toruch to heat it up and get it to re-set. I'm not going to though i think.
Yes it's battered, i paid £5 for it off Ebay but it was working till last night, heheh
csjsi
03-28-2008, 02:19 AM
Hope it didn't make a mess inside your rig :shakes:
If I was going to fix it Pete I'd take it down to the Radiator shop, not only do they repair this sort of thing every day, they can also pressure test it and acid clean it out for you as well. Who knows what the last owner done to it, and i hate to see you repair one end just to have the other end full off.
Hope it didn't make a mess inside your rig :shakes:
If I was going to fix it Pete I'd take it down to the Radiator shop, not only do they repair this sort of thing every day, they can also pressure test it and acid clean it out for you as well. Who knows what the last owner done to it, and i hate to see you repair one end just to have the other end full off.
I have 7 others about the room here if i needed to use any. No RAD shop here, UK lacks fundermentals like that! Have mailed Thermochill too see what they say!
I was benching outside so no mess on my rig at the time, if it did i'd gone made as £4k easyly gone in water.
RD30 can empty a water butt in seconds @ full voltage. It was cold last night so made the most of it
Off she goes
Hiya Pete,
Well this is a first. These radiators are tested to 25 psi before they are dispatched from the factory and so far we have never had anything like this in the past 5 yrs.
Send the radiator back and I will get our guys to have a look at it.
Kind regards
Steve Verity
www.thermochill.com
www.over-clock.com
Martinm210
03-28-2008, 06:36 AM
Off she goes
Glad to see you're well taken care of:up:
Xilikon
03-28-2008, 06:55 AM
Hopefully, you get a new one back as a thank you for sending the defective sample :)
rocket733
03-28-2008, 07:19 AM
That's pretty nice of them considering you purchased it 2nd hand and they have no way of knowing if the previous owner abused it in some way. Usually after an item is resold there's no warranty left.
Aldy402
03-28-2008, 07:21 AM
did it just blow off, or did it just come off a little and you just pulled it off?
I have a new respect for the rd-30
Xilikon
03-28-2008, 07:27 AM
Knowing this is 2nd hand, I can venture to guess the previous owner might have run with hot water for a bit, hot enough to soften the solder. After this, it's becoming too weak to hold the pressure...
Sort of makes you think twice about using boiling water to clean out these radiators.
I stilldon't understand how it could have happened. RD30 is powerful, but it can't be that powerful. Certainly 15 psi isn't anywhere enough to do anything like that.
Martinm210
03-28-2008, 08:07 AM
It must have been a repeated stress of sorts in the soldering bondline. I don't think using hot water to clean the radiator once could do much of anything to the radiator, but a constant accumulation of stresses in the solder caused by expansion/contraction from heating up and down along with perhaps vibration stresses from the fans would have caused it.
It's amazing sometimes what small repeated stresses over a long period of time will do, I see alot of similar things with bridges. Enough continuous stress on anything even if those stresses are small will eventually cause a failure.
Kind of like the old water drop on the forehead torture thing..:D
iadstudio
03-28-2008, 08:15 AM
Sort of makes you think twice about using boiling water to clean out these radiators.
I stilldon't understand how it could have happened. RD30 is powerful, but it can't be that powerful. Certainly 15 psi isn't anywhere enough to do anything like that.
That and buying WC gear on ebay. You never know what it's been through.
Martinm210
03-28-2008, 08:18 AM
Also don't underestimate pressure over a large surface area. The base cap is about 4.8" x 2.1" which is about 10 square inches.
10in x 14psi = 140 lbs. So with 14psi, that's a 140 lb equivalent force trying to push that cap off.
It was pretty funny one day when I was out inspecting a subdivision sewer installation way back in my inspection days, one of our tests for leakes was an air pressure test of the system at 5psi. The test was to see it hold pressure for a period of time. Well one of the contractors was worried about an 8" cleanout pipe that rises out of the ground from a y connector. So he had the wise idea to have his counterpart sit on that pipe that had an end cap on it.
He was a little suprised when it lifted his 200lb guy right along with the pipe. Only 5psi, but an 8" pipe has 50 square inches of surface area resisting, so that's 250lbs of force.
The almighty pressure, just remember the force over unit of area...lots of area means a lot of force.
It took me ten mins searching in my garden to find it! The base that is.
It went bang and with a gas, no word of warning at all.
Flow was Res (water butt) > pump > rad > block > res
Aye im pretty in with all the Uk shops and what not. Plus trading std helps loads
Xilikon
03-28-2008, 08:26 AM
Yeah, thermal stress and lot of pressure in a large area might explain this. Now to see what the TC guys find out...
BlueAqua
03-28-2008, 08:28 AM
That radiator looks like it's been to hell and back. The solder probably got soft while it was down there, I hear it's hot. With that kind of abuse I'd feel damn lucky if Thermochill did any kind of reimbursement.
If you have 7 other radiators why use that one?
Martinm210
03-28-2008, 08:29 AM
It took me ten mins searching in my garden to find it! The base that is.
It went bang and with a gas, no word of warning at all.
Flow was Res (water butt) > pump > rad > block > res
Aye im pretty in with all the Uk shops and what not. Plus trading std helps loads
Were you running a nozzle, if so which one?
I was just curious where on the pump curve you were running at. It wouldn't be 14PSI of pressure unless you were ate 24V and 100% restriction, but somewhere along the curve depending on how much restiction you had.
iadstudio
03-28-2008, 08:33 AM
That is seriously scary to think about.
That radiator looks like it's been to hell and back. The solder probably got soft while it was down there, I hear it's hot. With that kind of abuse I'd feel damn lucky if Thermochill did any kind of reimbursement.
If you have 7 other radiators why use that one?
Cos i wouldn't use 7 brand new ones outside and on the floor. Use the crap. Plus i was helping a mate so i use spears or old kit for that.
Were you running a nozzle, if so which one?
I was just curious where on the pump curve you were running at. It wouldn't be 14PSI of pressure unless you were ate 24V and 100% restriction, but somewhere along the curve depending on how much restiction you had.
Yeah he was, think it was the smallest one. It didn't half make a nice jet over 30ft with some power still there!
That is seriously scary to think about.
Please not this rad was massivly abused and will not happen to any other rad. It's been in hell from last owner and with me as it's been used for a water cooler desperter condernser on a cascade and had water temps of 75c
Waterlogged
03-28-2008, 09:07 AM
That is seriously scary to think about.
Yeah, it's a good thing you weren't standing it front of it when she blew otherwise, someone would be picking pieces of Pete out of the garden. :eek:
Yeah, it's a good thing you weren't standing it front of it when she blew otherwise, someone would be picking pieces of Pete out of the garden. :eek:
It sounds so wrong but there is part of me in my garden. I snapped my shin when i was 17 in there on my trials demo rig. I took the front half of my shin clean off. LOL is all i can do about it now all these years on
rogueagent6
03-28-2008, 09:48 AM
Use the crap.
Please not this rad was massivly abused and will not happen to any other rad. It's been in hell from last owner and with me as it's been used for a water cooler desperter condernser on a cascade and had water temps of 75c
And you expect to get your money back? From who, the previous owner? :rolleyes:
And you expect to get your money back? From who, the previous owner? :rolleyes:
My abuse was it getting put through it's pasese via usesage, but the old owner clearly bashed it about the gaff
daedality
03-28-2008, 11:41 AM
Also don't underestimate pressure over a large surface area. The base cap is about 4.8" x 2.1" which is about 10 square inches.
10in x 14psi = 140 lbs. So with 14psi, that's a 140 lb equivalent force trying to push that cap off.
Yeah, but wouldn't that be assuming that all 10 inches of surface area was being pressed upon? Wouldn't it be half of the surface area pushed upon while the other half was neutral because it was going back into the rad?
Martinm210
03-28-2008, 12:33 PM
Yeah, but wouldn't that be assuming that all 10 inches of surface area was being pressed upon? Wouldn't it be half of the surface area pushed upon while the other half was neutral because it was going back into the rad?
No the pressure is constant (+- .01PSI) within that reservoir, so it get's the full frontal area that's perpedicular to the force. There is some loss of pressure across the entire radiator from the fricitional losses, but it only amounts to less than about .5PSI depending on flow rate.
Pressure doesn't care which way water is flowing, it's just pressure. You're thinking about thrust and momentum of water and while that is important in large pipes like city waterlines with huge flow rates, we're talking very very small amounts of thrust from the velocity of water changing directions in water cooling, the pressure within that's produced by the pump is the critical one and what's really creating 99% of that force.
AllAgainstPaul
03-28-2008, 01:31 PM
Did it blow when you started up the pump or was it running for a while?
I don't know if a RD30 can produce a pressure hammer strong enough to do that though.
Maglin
03-28-2008, 06:31 PM
Well solder doesn't get soft anywhere near 100*C which is boiling for water. The radiator in your car is built almost the same what. And it has over 103*C constant water temps and around 15 PSI or 1+ Bar of pressure. It is cycled everytime you start it up cold.
Only a few ways for that end cap to blow off. One it could be been defective and the extra pressure of the RD30 was enough to pop the cap. Two would be massive abuse while it was very cold which could cause the end cap to shrink more than the core and shock/abuse caused stress fractures in the solder weakening the bond.
But I like it. Great to see the inside of the PA.
Edit: I believe it should be warrantied. One way or another it's pretty much manufacture defect. Now if you where running a refrigerant through the core and using it as a low side evap/HX then no cause it would be seeing temps it was never designed to handle.
Now if you where running a refrigerant through the core and using it as a low side evap/HX then no cause it would be seeing temps it was never designed to handle.
No i didn't do this. I used the rad as a rad, thats rad for water cooling. I had a 30 plate HX which has one side the gas in and other water, that water needs cooling so the PA120.1 did that.
daedality
03-29-2008, 10:13 AM
No the pressure is constant (+- .01PSI) within that reservoir, so it get's the full frontal area that's perpedicular to the force. There is some loss of pressure across the entire radiator from the fricitional losses, but it only amounts to less than about .5PSI depending on flow rate.
Pressure doesn't care which way water is flowing, it's just pressure. You're thinking about thrust and momentum of water and while that is important in large pipes like city waterlines with huge flow rates, we're talking very very small amounts of thrust from the velocity of water changing directions in water cooling, the pressure within that's produced by the pump is the critical one and what's really creating 99% of that force.
Ahh, thanks. That makes a lot more sense now.