Now if only I had a track shovel… that’d take forever by hand out here. We’ve got 2″ of dirt then its lime stone for 20′. Pretty sweet idea though.

why not use the heat to better use by storing it in a hot water tank or similar? Since your doing all that heating anyhoo!

This would be much more useful as a ground source heat pump for the house’s heating and cooling. It seems like a waste to use it only for a computer.

Well, while it’s a great thing, he shoudn’t have realy done it for the environment.. the emissions of the shovel would take years to compensate with a heat pump..

@adamzieger
If he has conected it to the cpu (i am assuming he has) i think his temp is flatlined, but swings with the Enviro temp more than anything. also he has not posted a cpu temp graph there

This is all fine and good, but I’m not seeing a stress test graph.

It does no good if it keeps it COLD at idle but does no better than normal watercooling at full load…

Pretty stupid. If he would recycle the heat or something, but I don’t see any reason why it would be necessary to destroy your backyard just to cool 1,4 kW. The bottleneck is going to be the heatsink on the CPU anyway, not to the radiator. 1,4 kW? Just regular air cooling after a primary liquid cooling cycle would do!

Is it just me or is his geothermal cooling system in fact just an underground heat store that’s slowly but surely accumulating the heat it’s supposed to transfer.

Methinks circulating the water through a conventional radiator would be more efficient and cost effective.

Would probably work better if the loops were in a decorative pond in the back yard.

nice claw. people in cities would require a building permit for a task like that.
you should try to dig a hole so deep that it resurfaces elsewhere, if you just dug at the right angle away from houses, and then come back up somewhere.. if it collapeses you just built a nice drainage ditch so your house wont flood. and maybe your own grave but thats why u need a Technodrome or whatever.

Seems a little overkill. He could have just fed the cord into a pond/watertank etc.

nice digger btw

@Andrew Pollack

I’m with you. I used to live in Michigan where winters get very cold, and it annoyed me that electricity was used to create a cold spot inside my fridge, inside of a house that I used electricity to heat, in an environment that was cold.

A truly “green” fridge would feature a couple of filtered dryer hoses that could connect to the outside world. Any time the outdoor temp was lower than the fridge thermostat setting, the fridge would circulate outside air (with dampers and a low power fan) in preference to firing up an energy-intensive compressor. Needless to say, this model of fridge would only sell in higher latitude areas.

I now live in the desert in the Southwest. It’s retarded to pay $$$ to pump heat out of the interior of my fridge, into my living space, and then pay again to pump the heat from my living space to the outdoors. A green fridge for this area would feature a couple of hoses that would let me vent waste heat directly outdoors. (Ideally, the heat could be used to pre-heat water flowing into the hot water heater, but hey, you can’t have everything.

Pookey

I think its brilliant, perhaps its a bit overkill, but go big or go home!

Seriously, if every project was designed for ‘just enough’ or ‘common sense’ then think about what we wouldn’t have. ie: pyramids, manned moon missions, dubai towers, twinkies…

It would seem to me that this would be better if you used it for your home AC and heating.
Of course it did get me thinking. I have seen some desks that used concrete for the desktop. Now if you embedded lines in the concrete you could use your entire desktop as a heatsink.
So the longer you worked the warmer you desk would get.

To each their own I guess. I could put a 1/4 mile of pipe in a loop om my property. I wished I could because, it would basically eliminate using refrigerated AC in the summer, and greatly reduce how much I have to spend to heat my home in the Winter, Here a ditch which can cut a ditch 6′ deep with no problem, no need for a backhoe. Anyway these projects aren’t about being “green”, just someone with enough money to take a hobby or passion past the extreme.

having followed the build from start to finnish i can tell you that it is capable of providing 1000w of cooling power at a 1degree delta and as it is buried 15′ down the soil temp never rises enough to llower this allowing the pc to run on 100% literally forever with all the components having there own block.