Leak Testing

I mentioned in the last post that I just made, that the case is complete, and the water cooling loop is read for leak testing. Time to get out of my grubby basement, and into the living room to fill the loop. I have laminate flooring in my living room which requires re finishing so if I spill coolant, or even sulfuric acid on the flooring, I am not damaging anything that I would be upset about.

My first task at hand is setting up my test environment. I do not want to be running the system while leak testing (which would negate the leak testing) so I need to "hot wire" an old power supply unit. Just about anyone who hoards old computer parts will have one or two these things. My choice was my "Power Max" 250w power supply. I doubt this thing could handle a 150w load on it, let alone 250w, but that is enough to run my pump.

Old power supply unit

Generally you need to jump the green wire (pin 16) to any black ground wire of the main motherboard connector. I use this power supply as a means of testing other things (like fans, case lighting, and now water cooling) so I have actually cut and spliced the green wire to a black wire; I use the main shutoff of the power supply as an on/off switch.

I had to remove the tape to show this. Use electrical tape

or heat shrink to cover this

Here I am filling the system through the top fill port 

So for some explanation of me filling the loop. as you can see I am using a funnel and turkey baster to put coolant through the fill port. You can order syringe like devices design for PC liquid cooling, but I decided that a trip to the dollar store would suffice. A set of 3 funnels and the turkey baster set me back a whopping two dollars. DO NOT reuse items that come in contact with coolant to handle food.

Now as you can also see, I have one hand filling the system, and another hand on the power switch of the tester PSU. I would hit the switch to turn it on and slowly fill the funnel with fluid until my baster was empty. Normally I would look at the tubing of the fill-port to see where the liquid level is, however the Fesser One UV Blue tubing is way too day to see the liquid.

Bubbles in the loop, caught inside the CPU water block

The only indication of fluid level I can see is through the clear plexi-glass top of the CPU water block. As you can see there are air bubbles in the loop. These can be tricky to remove, usually when first filling a system I will flip the switch for the pump on and off for 10 second periods a few dozen times, adding coolant every handful of power cycles.

I didn't get all the air out of the system, but that is okay. I leak test over usually a 24hour minimum period. I will check on the system every few hours and drop coolant into the fill port while the system is on. Even after I am using the system, I will hear for the pump catching air bubble when I initially turn on a system to know when to top the loop off with coolant.

For the leak test I like to use white paper towel. I lay paper towel all over the bottom over the case, making sure to keep under where ever there is a tubing connection, including T or Y adapters.

Laying down the paper towel

 Now to put the computer into a safe place, and leave it for 24hours. For some added bling, I played around with the uv cathodes I had for the case. My girlfriend got a shot of me waving them around like light sabers.

Special needs Jedi

Preview of how the UV setup will look

Checking for green stains

After 24 hours. I do a paper towel inspection. Since I used green coolant, I am looking for any hints of green liquid stains. I also do a quick look checking near all the tubing connections, to make sure they are dry, and not wet. Since bubbles are still being worked through the system, it is impossible to tell if there is a leak if the coolant level seemed to drop.

I had no indication of fluid leaks, which is good! Some people like to leak test systems over a few days, however if it didn't within 24 hours, I doubt it will ever leak.

As an added bonus of playing around with UV light sources. A cool item to try is Tonic Water, which is different than Club Soda and Soda Water. It seems to glow a super light blue.

Tonic Water + UV light = Saturday night entertainment