1

Disaster

I was cooking and in the corner of my eye I hear my dog leap! She's fairly jumpy so I didn't think much of it, until I turned to see fluid splashing all over the side of my PC! I leap over and flip the power switch on the PSU and unplug the rig, and quickly grab some towels and start cleaning up the mess. It took me quite a while to soak up the purple-pc-blood. The good news - no liquid reached any components. The bad news, a piece of tubing literally got spit out of one of the fittings. What happened?! Upon checking all the fittings, the one which popped out was very loose. It wasn't until later that I realized how that happened... So, obviously I had to drain the rest of the loop. I had planned on ordering a couple ball-valve fittings before doing my first drain so I could add them into the loop to make future maintainence easier. Well, that's just not going to happen. Now, when I planned this loop I figured that the res would provide all the drainage ports I could ever want. Boy was I wrong. When I opened the drain port of the distro-plate and let some air in, only about 60% of the fluid actually drained, even while tipping the rig all over the place trying to displace it. It's just not possible. The way the GPU & CPU loops connect back to the distro plate makes it impossible for the fluid to move back throughout the plate by just tipping the rig various angles. So, I had to literally tip the rig into positions where the CPU or GPU loop had all the fluid away from a specific fitting, unplug that fitting and drain each section of the loop that way. It was messy, it was NOT what you want to be doing. I'll be ordering four ball-valve fittings, and three T-joint fittings:

  • One ball-valve for the main drain port of the distro plate
  • A T-Joint and Ball-Valve for each of the CPU, GPU and Radiator loops I'll connect the T-Joint in-line with the existing loop, then connect the ball-valve remaining ends. When it comes time to drain the loop, I'll simply screw on some flexible tubing and go to town. Easy!

Diagnosis

Now, while draining the loop by removing all the tubes one-by-one, I of course had to connect them back up again. While I was doing this I paid closer attention to how I was putting everything into place. I realized that for the piece of tubing that came loose, I was naturally connecting one end to the distro-plate and rotating the tube into place on the GPU. The fitting I was rotating around, became loose. This was of course the exact fitting that was loose that popped out. BINGO! Alright so, lesson LEARNED. Hopefully I can do a much better job checking my fittings and never end up damaging my rig.

Re-Fill and Re-Light

With all that over with, it was time to refill it! I learned from my mistakes last time here too. While I had to turn the pump on/off many many times to get it filled up, I learned a new trick to get air bubbles out. The piece of flexible tubing I had hooked up to the one open hole, at the highest point in the distro-plate, I would fill the tube with fluid and hold it up. Air bubbles would slowly escape through the fluid and get replaced with fluid! It took a while, but this time I got the rest almost entirely air-free! And, here's the end result in all it's christmas glory: 2