I've been casually researching water chillers over the past few days, as it gets quite hot here in the summer (>105F easily) and my basic W/C setup will not likely be able to keep my CPU <45C in that heat.

Most of the stuff I have seen here involves large/messy setups with lots of exposed pipe and A/C power or just in general setups that take up too much room. While these are very impressive performance wise, they are not really suited to my apartment w/ wife+small kids. I was trying to design something that was somewhat attractive and self-contained, and came up with the following design.

Since I am new to chilling, I would appreciate any comments on this (flaws, problems, etc):


note: not pictured here are the on/off switches (3 switches: for fan, pump, and compressor)

basically the goal of this is to have a quiet, easy to hide solution that allows simply hooking up normal 1/2" ID Tygon to those inlet/outlet barbs and routing them through some holes drilled in the back of my case.

A few questions:

1) I am not really interested in sub-zero temps-- I don't want to have to deal with a lot of bulky insulation and condensation problems. I am looking for temps in the 10-20C range. Is this possible using chillers or do they always go sub-zero?

2) is the methanol necessary since I am not planning to go sub-zero? (see#1)

3) are any of the aquarium chillers listed HERE up to this task? they are expensive but it would be worth it for the size and eliminating the hassle of ripping apart a fridge or air conditioner in my apartment

4) Could something like this be used to cool multiple computers in a daisy chain?

5) How maintenance free do you think something like this would be? Do you think there would be too much evaporation, and how often would the refrigerant need to be changed? I am looking for something that can be run continuously for 6 months or more without maintenance.

comments?