I just opened up a new parcel today containing the last of my water heaters. First I decided on a smaller variac, and then I had hoped I could use the variac with an aquarium heater. I just tried out the heater with the variac and got a nice 0-300 watts of finely tuned heat load. Now between the three of them I can add 0-900 watts of heat to the pump heat dump and tinker with some thermal testing..
The water heaters will go in my custom 4" black PVC reservoir you see to the left in this picture, it should work pretty well I think.
I'm not going to bother with insulating lines and all that, I just want to record water/ambient deltas using my crystalfontz and Dallas probes. I figured that'll be good enough..
Now for the questions?
- Which Fans do I test with and at what voltage?
- What heat loads should I test at?
I was thinking about trying to match some common heat load values as I plot out the trend.
Maybe something like 100watts, 400, watts, 900 watts or something similar. Then if I plotted a trendline for that I could interpolate the 10C delta point. Maybe something less for single/double radiators??
Also not sure on the flow rate variable. Maybe I'll run all of the above at a fixed 1.5GPM, and then do one series of tests to see how the radiator reacts to varied flow rates..?
Open to suggestions, I havn't found any sort of standard for this type of testing, so I'm scratching my head as I go...
This should be fun..
Better start saving up for a few fans. I have a few yate loons sitting here, and three of the 86cfm panaflos, but nothing else. Seems some of the thermochill and swiftech testing used Nexxus fans which run at 1000 RPM. With yate loons being more popular, I think those are a giveme, but what else is really popular for radiators??
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