Posted: 3-12-2000
Written by: Mota

I have seen some nicely designed home built water coolers in the last few months. Many of the people who put these things together put a lot of thought into the design and execution of their projects. But my project went a little differently. It was like "gather up all the parts and see what you can put together."

The first thing that I knew is I wanted the radiator to be close to the window air conditioner and outside air system. So that kinda left out mounting it in my case. Also, the full-length PCI card in my case made mounting my water reservoir in there an impossibility. I had already bought the reservoir and wasn't even thinking about that stupid card being in the way. So now I knew I didn't have the cool built-in system, so it was all about putting my "stuff" in a separate box.

The "stuff" consisted of a one-gallon polyethylene mason jar and assorted nylon barbed pipe fittings from McMaster Carr, the smallest Hayden Trans cooler from Pep Boys Auto Parts, an Eheim in-line submersible pump (the 79 gallon per hour one) from http://www.petsmart.com.

The rotary flow indicator is also from McMaster Carr. For the water block I used a part from http://www.coolchip.com but I changed the 1/4 inch fittings to 3/8.

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