Maximum PC

Maybe I am just retarded and havent looked around enough, but explain to me why you cannot use anti-freeze in a water-cooling system. It can cool down car engine, it doesnt evaporate, it will run through the pump without hurting the pump, and nothing grows in coolant. Am I missing something? I am not talking about the cooling additive you add to the water, I am talking about the antifreeze coolant you add to cars btw. It would actually dissapate the heat better than water.

You are missing something...

You CAN run it in there if you wanted to and many many many folks do so. But the only thing in it that actually cools for you is the glycol/water mix, and that's why most users just use water with glycol...cut out the middle man and all the other "stuff" in it. You really don't need antifreeze unless your room is really really cold. Look at water wetter and my favorite, Royal Purple ICE.

Folks have been using antifreeze as well, but I don't understand that aspect really. DangerDen and many others stock Zerex Super Coolant, so I guess thats the Automotive coolant to use. Or you can pick your color. The stuff you get and a VW dealer is blue, so you could use that and have blue water:p

i thought people used it, for some reason i just couldnt find people who used it where i was looking,

Doesnt the water/glycol mix evaporate though? How often do you have to refill usually?

thanks for the response
Jonathan

Everything evaporates I guess. But as long as it's in a closed loop, it's not exposed to air to allow it to evaporate. The only place it has a chance to do so is in the reservoir really. On top of that, heat is what accelerates the evap process. The warmer your water gets, the quicker it goes away. In setups with bongs (like the tank-o-matic), it's possible to have water sitting in there COOLER than room temp. This is one reason I like using a reservoir. And then there's the variable of your location. It's often muggy in SE Kansas during the summer, and may not fill up as much as a person in Arizona may.

Anyway, it's always a concern to keep the level up, and no matter what your mix is, is done pretty frequently. If you can't see the reservoir, there's a definate sound of the pump grabbing air. It won't fry you if you catch it, but it sure won't be happy until you fill it again! And of course, the frequency of top-offs depends on the capacity. With the tank-o-matic, I topped off every Sunday. My current reservoir is custom built and holds a lot of water. I do the top-off every other weekend now.

People may be drifting from Automotive coolant just because all this neato stuff is being tried and spread through forums like this. A single thread preaching about water wetter could make a LOT of folks dump out their Zerex and start using the stinky pink stuff (WW smells funny and why I started looking for an alternative like the Royal Purple).

And not to overlook on these additives are the other properties it does. Anti-corrosion is a big one. In a basic setup like mine, there's all sorts of metal types (brass, nickle, copper, aluminum, etc...) and water touches it all, so it's bound to start gunking up if you just ran water/glycol. Then there's the junk that can condense in even bottled water that'll build over time...and then the algae that'll grow without a seperate antimicrobial solution (I even got that icky stuff growing in AquaFina and Royal Purple, so...that stuff grows in all sorts of solutions).

Like Chumly said you can use anti-freeze but pay attention to its name. ANTI FREEZE meaning it wont freeze when it gets really cold. Thats one of its main things. The second is it does cool better than regular water and doesnt corrode like water does (i mean like calcium deposites the white gunk). Oh and by the way never use the Royal Purple oil that you put in your engine to lubricate the gears. That stuff may sound good but it sucks really bad. My dad builds engines as part of his business and it lost because his friend put Royal Purple it it. It ran really bad and hot and it lost lots of horsepower and torque over the first time we dynoed it.

Well, I wouldn't put gear oil in an engine anyway But they're one of my latest sponsors and seems to hold up fine. Ya, I'd rather have a tire sponser or something more useful, but I'll take what I can get.

Anyway, their stuff is holding up fine with me. I personally like many other oils.

The reason people mostly shy away from antifreeze is its relatively high viscosity compared to plain old water. A higher viscosity means a lower flow rate through the loop which means diminished cooling capability. Antifreeze (glycol) also doesn't transfer heat as well as plain water does, meaning that less heat is transferred to the coolant from the water block as the coolant passes through it (coupled with the lower flow rate = lower cooling performance)

If you are dealing with a basic water cooler (no active phase change or peltier cooling of the coolant) the best thing to use from a performance standpoint is plain distilled water. However, we all have problems with algae, deposits, etc (no distilled water is ever pure water(deposits) and you will never have a completely sterile environment in your loop(algae/growth). So we opt for additives to combat these problems.

In a nutshell there are better things than antifreeze to use in your water cooler, thats why most people don't use it.