Liquid-Cooled Gaming Machine: Leak Prevention and Monitoring Solutions

Linus faced a catastrophic leak in his gaming rig but turned to community insights and Pulseway for effective monitoring solutions.

### Solving Liquid Cooling Catastrophes: Leak Detection and Prevention in Gaming Rigs
* 💧 A recent episode of Lus Tech Disasters revealed a **catastrophic leak** in a custom liquid-cooled gaming machine, leading to **water damage across multiple systems**.
* 🔍 Initially suspected to be a loose fitting, further inspection uncovered that the actual issue was **severe corrosion of a fitting** on the cooling block.
* 🛠 Despite extensive checks, all other fittings appeared intact, prompting the creator to seek insights from the YouTube community, which suggested various theories regarding the **corrosion**.
* ⚡ The issue was traced back to **voltage differences caused by high power draws** in the system, leading to **accelerated galvanic corrosion**, which was mitigated by installing an **isolation transformer for electrical decoupling**.
* 🔌 Additional upgrades included grounding the rack and implementing a monitoring system with **leak, flow, and float sensors** to ensure **early detection of future issues**.
* 📊 The integration of a Raspberry Pi with custom automation boards facilitated **real-time monitoring and control**, allowing for **automated shutdowns** in case of leaks or insufficient flow.
* 🛡 The final setup featured robust safety measures, including the ability to **remotely turn off pumps if a leak was detected**, significantly **reducing the risk of damage from future leaks**.
* 📱 Sponsored by Pulseway, the project showcased the **importance of remote management solutions** for monitoring system health and responding to issues **promptly, even from afar**.

On our last episode of Lus Tech Disasters, one of the custom liquid-cooled gaming machines in my home rack sprung a leak, pouring gallons of water over every system beneath it. My initial thought was, Oh, I forgot to screw in a fitting. But as it turned out, despite taking precautions to prevent it, it wasn't a fitting not being screwed in; it was a fitting completely corroding off of the block. Maybe some of the metals in our Looper incompatible? Nope. After spending hours inspecting them, every other system's fittings were spotless, not a hint of corrosion to be seen. I was so dumbfounded that I turned to the YouTube comments for help, and it actually worked. There was a strong consensus on what the problem was. So today, with the help of Pulseway, who sponsored this video, we're going to hopefully rectify this silent killer and add a remote monitoring system so that, uh, if there ever is another leak, hey, at least I'll know about it before I come home at the end of the day and find that

my computer peed [Music] itself. The first really good community theory was that the fancy fuel hose we were using as our tubing might use steel webbing to reinforce it, which could introduce galvanic corrosion. But this was actually due to a miscommunication on my part. It's not fuel hose; it's a general-purpose hose, and it uses a textile reinforcement rather than steel, so we can scratch that one. Another interesting theory was that a micro crack in the Delrin plastic of the GPU block might have allowed the steel screws that hold it down to come in contact with the water. But a close visual inspection reveals no cracks, and the threading for all of those screws is completely clean, which suggests that no corrosion occurred there. A third theory was that a flaw in the plating of the affected fittings could allow galvanic corrosion to occur with the underlying metal, which would explain why some of them were eaten while others remained perfect. But the thing is, when you or EK, in this case, is designing anything that

involves metal and water. Galvanic corrosion is something that they carefully consider. So, while the most obvious way to avoid corrosion is to never mix metals, there are many metals that are safe to mix, especially when they're not directly connected. And the underlying material of these fittings is brass, which, if you consult this anodic index, should be fine with the copper and other metals in our loop. Should be fine. The story changes when you apply a voltage, and well, we obviously weren't intentionally doing that. When you have a large power draw in one spot, like a couple thousand watts of computers in a rack, and a low power draw in another spot, like a couple hundred watts from a pump, you're going to end up with a difference in voltage between them, which accelerates corrosion dramatically and can make compatible metals far less compatible. But the good news is for this solution. Oh boy, oh wow, we don't have to worry about the details. This is an isolation transformer, and you might be familiar with transformers. You

would use one to take like a low voltage and make it a higher voltage or vice versa, like to run your sewing machine from Asia. Yeah, if you're in a different country, that's a big one. Yeah, in this case, it's 120 volt on both sides. You see that made in Canada. Thanks, Hammond Manufacturing. But it decouples the circuit, giving us galvanic isolation or preventing a loop. So, in a nutshell, we're taking anything that's plugged into this guy and we're giving it absolutely no path back to the main panel. It's almost like Wi-Fi for your electricity. I feel like our analogies are making this worse. The point is no voltage differ fren wrap it before you tap it. Where do we want to put this thing? How about up here on top of the tank? The tank full of water. I mean, it should be fine, right? Yeah, I mean, realistically, while we're here, I should probably have the pumps running off the UPS. You'd have to run an extension cord.

all the way over there conveniently is that an extension cord that's all the way right there. Yeah, I really don't think that's long enough. I don't think it's worse than that. Yeah, I don't think it's long enough. Look how long that is. That's a 25-footer. It'll work. You want to bet everyone's lunch on it? If I'm right, you pay for everyone's lunch. If I'm wrong, wrong, nothing happens. Fine. It has to go all the way down to plug into the bottom UPS. It has to be managed, sure. He's literally trying to cable manage it as much as possible to prevent it from reaching. Dude, these are so satisfying. I will admit they are quite good. LTTstore.com, let's go. That might be the best thing you've ever done. My kid's right there. What? No, he's not. Oh, he's somewhere. It's going to be so funny when you lose. Wow, it reaches. No way. No way you're buying 's lunch. Get wrecked. Fine, even though I owe him lunch.

technically, yeah, one of the big things that you guys said was, Hey, no matter what caused this problem, you should really have monitoring in place so that if it were to ever happen again, you would know. And on top of that, we can make automation so if there's a leak, shut off the pumps. Yeah, it's going to be good theoretically. Everything is fine now, I mean, but maybe, but that doesn't mean we're going to jop here. Okay, what's next? Grounding. Grounding. All right, you're not going out for a week. Says who? You going to stop me? I have your stepdad's number. Keyword being step. Are you going to take that? He might actually see this. To take things to another level, we're going to follow another recommendation that came up a lot in the comments. Some of you noticed that, um, I never grounded my rack. While the systems themselves are theoretically grounded using the third prong of the plug that we plug into them, the rack itself is not necessarily connected to ground. So, we got a whole bunch of these.

grounding leads, and then what we just connect these from the back of every chassis to the rack. Uh, you could, but we also got this here catch o, uh, like a grounding bus bar. So, you just stick that in the rack and then screw all the little thingies onto it. C man, no, no, we got this, we got this, okay. Oh, that just barely fits. Yeah, so that could go right there. It's almost like it's made for a rack. Naturally, we have to ground our grounding bar to something for it to work as a grounding bar. Unfortunately, the rack is a bit of a ways from the panel, and our electrician who is going to do this properly for us is unavailable today. So, instead, we're going to have to open up the panel and tie the wires directly into the grounding bar. It also means I didn't have the correct wire, so Linus happened to have these like two pretty thick gauge wires, so we're going to use those instead. I also didn't have the correct connector, so I cut these hammonded ones.

but connected them onto the long wire, and now we have the right connector. Is this how you should do this? Probably not, but it's just a ground. It's probably fine, right? Reyes, I don't know what I'm doing. Got it. Hey, it worked. There we go, grounded. I'm going to let Linus be the one to open the panel and stick his fingers in there 'cause it's his house. So, we're just going to leave this for now. Hammond sent us these sick little grounding kits, and they have little just blade connectors. So, you hook one side up to the server, one side up to the grounding bar, and then if you need to take the server out for some reason, you can easily disconnect it. Let's try it with one of Linus's NAS units here. Just unscrew that. Look at that. Wow. Now we just repeat like 10 times while Reese works on getting all the systems grounded. Let's talk sensors. We have three different types, starting with our leak sensor. Although calling it a sensor might be, you know, a bit generous.

this is B. Basically, just like two wires, you apply voltage to one side, and as your leak bridges the gap with water, it creates an electrical connection between the other side. On that side, you're just sensing for any voltage. So, when there's no water, it should be zero volts. When there is water, say if we did 5 volts on this side, it'll probably show like one or two volts on this side. So, that works. And then, we've got a flow sensor. This one is really just to tell us if, say, the water runs out or the pump stops working, which would obviously be bad 'cause then the water inside the computers would boil, which might cause a leak. This way, we can notify ourselves if the water is not flowing. And then, we've also got a little float switch. Very simple. This one, if it's at the bottom, current passes. If it's at the top, current doesn't pass. So, we stick it in the water tank here at the top, and we can tell if it's full or

not I you not. This is how we're going to test it later, but before we can install it, we have to drain the loop, which is going to be interesting. This valve is open, and nothing is coming out. I saw a comment; somebody said they had experience with hose bibs like that, and they said that some of the manufacturers started using really crappy cheap materials in them that are not necessarily compatible with plumbing. And I just looked up in there, and you know what I saw? Corrosion. I read the comment, and I was like, This is too stupid to be true, lonus. Guess what doesn't happen when you open this hose bib? No, you're ballsy. Stick your phone light up there. Uhoh. Can you imagine if that's literally what caused all of this? You've got to be kidding me. You know, whole room water cooling was exactly the same thing. It was a vendor cheaping out on the parts. That Reservoir was supposed to be stainless steel. I mean, you should have ched a plastic one, but it wasn't made of

stainless steel. I use a plastic one. Yeah, you also were the one who spec'd this supposedly brass hose bib, smart guy. So, I bought it from a plumbing store. So, it looks like we were both bamboozled. You don't get to be all, Yeah, but at least my idea was like a good one. It's also good that I got this particulate filter. Yeah, I found one that's plastic, actually. It's polypropylene, I think. Nice. Oh no, it's polyester. It's like a t-shirt, basically. What are these made of? H. Well, those are metal, but that's the same type that's already in the loop. Because I don't feel like going to the plumbing store and because I don't trust those things ever again, I'm going to make my own valve. I've got a little guy and a little valve. Look, I fixed the leak. It's going to get water everywhere. We have to make sure that we put it the right way. There's these very helpful arrows that I should follow. Oh look, I

even Drew arrows on the tubes, so I just matched the arrow with the arrow, and then I can't screw it up. Hey, ree, you leak tested this filter, right? Uh, filter installed, is that closed? Beautiful water in the filter, yay! The sensors are great and all, but they don't exactly work without something to read them. In the past, we bought little relay or input-output boards for Z-Wave or Wi-Fi on Amazon, but if you've seen anything about how Linus's Wireless has been working, I wanted something hardwired. And then I stumbled upon a company called Sequent Micro Systems, which sounds super nerdy, and to be honest, it kind of is. All they sell are these custom home and industrial automation boards, and this one, which is a Raspberry Pi hat, just plugs into a Rasp Pi. This one has 16 universal sensors on it. That means we could handle all seven of the gaming computers in here for leak sensors. We could put a couple on the floor, our two flow sensors, and still have room to spare. It was a little complicated to get

set up, but they actually had really good customer service. The guy was emailing me back within the hour responding, and they have a bunch of different boards. You get ones that have some sensors, some power outputs. You can get ones that have MOSFETs. You can get ones that have just cereal. Like, they make a lot of different products, and it's actually pretty awesome. This one in particular requires separate power, so you plug in a 5V power lead here, and then it powers the Raspberry Pi through it directly. There's also a battery for a real-time clock that's on the board that they use for hardware monitoring. So, if the Raspberry Pi becomes unresponsive, this board can reboot the Raspberry Pi. It's one of those things where you wouldn't really think about it for a house setup, but if you were stuffing this in a wall somewhere for industrial controls, you want to make sure this thing is operational. If there's an issue, it fixes itself. Imagine if you had like 200 of them, right? In a perfect world, I'd just

hook that sensor pin right up to this board and be done with it. But unfortunately, electronics can sometimes be a bit more complicated. In our case, we need to add something called a pull-up resistor, and that just makes sure that when there's no pulse being sent, the sensor reads a high signal, like close to our voltage, around 5 volts. If we didn't have that, the sensor wire can actually sometimes float between ground and 5 volts, which looks a lot like a pulse, which obviously we don't want. The pull-up resistor makes sure it's only ever reading the correct value, so it's very important to add. If you had an Arduino that was reading the sensor instead, they actually have a pull-up pin mode, which does it on the board. But in our case, we're just going to add one on this breadboard, and in the future, we'll just solder it into a piece of wire and be done with it. Does the flow sensor work? Uh, yeah, we literally just finished wiring it. Let me start screen recording. Here is it in

like a home. This done or like what is it do to control this. No, it can be if you want right now. I just wrote a little script. Um, obviously we have to interpret the data 'cause all we're getting is pulses. Uh, luckily they just give you a formula. You take the pulses per second or Hertz and divide by 5.5. That's your liters per minute. So, I made a little script to do that. Cool. Hey, 9 L per minute. So, we're getting roughly almost exactly 50 pulses per second, 50 HZ. That's the heartbeat of the whole setup. And then if we go to the other sensor, which I did flow to, it's off right now, right? No flow. Oh, no flow to the pool right now. So, what we'll do is adjust this script to send that data to the Pulseway API. And then we can make whatever workflows we want in Pulseway. And then on top of that, we can just make a little script that sends it to Home Assistant if you want. Super Home Assistant also allows like custom

components so you could have it on your phone. Now that the pool loop is refilled and running, we should be able to take a look at our flow from both of the pumps. I found this little terminal app called TTY plot, and you can plum data from a script to it, and it makes a little graph in your terminal. It's very cute. This top one is the local loop, so if I adjust the speed on the pump here, right now it's on low. If we go to high, hey, look at that. This is the outdoor loop, only pushing around 5 L per minute, which is pretty low. And then the indoor loop seems to hang out around 10.5 L per minute. Yeah, that's pretty bad. Oh, hey, look, everything's grounded. Yeah, look at that, it's all grounded. You won't be out for weeks. We were overthinking it. Each of them, we just found a screw and put it underneath the screw. Oh, that's great. The only thing is we didn't ground it into the panel yet, so it's not technically grounded.

anything right. I did run the wire over there. Oh, okay. Mostly is this you? Yeah, I grounded it. Huh. Okay, we should probably shut the panel off before we open it. Yeah, where's the, where's the one for this? Oh, this one. Oh my gosh. Okay, this is not an insulated screwdriver and is not rated for electrical work. The only reason I'm doing this is because this panel is completely off, de-energized. I do not recommend this. Don't try it at home, etc. Oh my goodness, who put this in here? This screw is, uh, it's like, it's shallow. It's just camming out every time. Can I try to do it? Hold on, hold on. We might not even need it. My God. Oh my God. Zero, zero. Okay, so everything in here is safe. I mean, well, we hope. The rack is hooked up now. See, you got a little ground cable going in there. Definitely not spliced inside the panel. Uh, that one. Now that the flow sensors are working, let's wire up a leak sensor. Like I mentioned before, we have to apply.

power to one side, so we'll plug this into 5V here, and then the other side instead of getting a pull-up resistor gets a pull-down resistor. It functions in a very similar way, but instead of pulling the voltage up to your kind of voltage supply level, it's pulling it down to zero because the path goes to ground. The last thing we've got to do is adjust the sensor on the board to be a 0 to 10-volt sensor. Boom! We can see that it's reading about 0.17 volts when, in theory, nothing is connected. Okay, if I bridge this now with a screwdriver, which is metal, it goes from like 0.1 volts right up to 5, which makes sense. When I let go, there's no path, and it reads 0.14. Now we just need to try with some water. Hey, it immediately registered .5 volts. Now, instead of printing this to the terminal, let's send this data to Pulseway. Fortunately for us, Pulseway has a cool feature called custom fields, and

it allows you to attach custom bits of data to systems, an entire site. You can do it globally if you want. Typically, you would use this with their script system. Say if you wanted to store the BitLocker keys for all the systems on your network, or the Windows licenses, or check battery data—things that you would only need to read like once a day or something like that. But in our case, we want to read these sensors like every 5 seconds. Fortunately, they also have an API, so we can just edit our little script. Instead of printing it to the console, send it to the Pulseway API, and then that'll set the data. While I don't technically need the Pulseway agent running on our sensor Raspberry Pi, I'm going to install it anyways 'cause then we can have monitoring. Obviously, if the sensor Raspberry Pi dies, that would be not great, and we'd want to know about that. Once it is installed, it's really easy to connect to the account. They actually have a command called like Pulseway registration. Just go register, no proxy, C custom server, yes, and just

pops out this big QR code, and Bam, it updates the config file and starts running pulseway. We should be able to see it in the pulseway window now. Hey, look at that Dreamhouse sensor Pi 4. Now, let's send some data. I went ahead and created a couple of custom fields in pulse white, one for the flow rate of the loop inside the house, and one for the flow rate of the loop that goes to the pool. And then, when we run this output updated count 9.45. And then, if we go to the site, if we go to Sebastian Dreamhouse custom fields, we can see that it's 9.45. Let's see if it stays that way. If I go ahead and turn the pump down, boom, 8.72. Perfect. Now, we just have to install pulseway on some machines so we can make them turn off when bad things happen. We're first going to make a workflow in pulseway. I made one here called shut off water-cooled computers. Ideally, you would make a system group and then put all the

systems in it, but for now, we're just going to use this one, which is land five, and just set that manually. I'm creating this as an ad hoc workflow, which means you have to manually trigger it, but you can also set them up to run on a schedule, say like every day at 2 a.m., or you can set it to run based off of a notification like CPU usage too high or disk full. Then we just say shut down, and there isn't an option to just shut off the computer because this is like an IT management solution, right? Generally, you don't want to like fully shut off a computer because now you can't manage it anymore. They do have an option for reboot, but we're going to say execute a PowerShell command of shutdown. I'm also going to add a send email task if the condition check fails because it would be a little weird for this workflow to get triggered and then the custom field read a value that's fine, like there's something wrong at that.

point. So we should get notified if that's the case. If the flow goes below one liter per minute, it should shut off. Land five, it should have done it. Did it do it? Uh, I wouldn't say that. It's definitely run the. You're about to be signed out. Windows will shut down in less than a minute. What? No way. Wait, it's going to shut down in a minute. It says less than a minute. She's shutting down, boys. Maybe I need to adjust that script a little bit to make it a little more urgent in terms of the shutting down, but not bad. Yeah, and when we combine that with the leak sensors, basically we can set it so that in the event that something goes bad, everything shuts off. The last part of our little electronics project here is being able to turn the pumps on and off. So if we detect a leak from one of the leak sensors, we can shut off the pump and limit the amount of water that gets out and the amount of damage. How do

you do that with relays. Each of these is a 40 amp 250-volt relay, which is way overkill for what we need. I can just plug a Serial cable into this, which is in this case an ethernet cable, and plug the other side into our sensor board, and then control this remotely from the raspy and the sensor board. That means we can put this right next to the pumps, run an ethernet cable back over here, and Bob's your uncle, we can control the pumps remotely. Long term, I think we could mount it in the big isolation Transformer box that actually has a switch already, so we could probably just wire this up to the switch. But for now, we're just going to do this to try it. This is not my finest work, but I've spliced the relay in between the load wire on this power bar, and these are all connected with wire nuts, so they should be relatively safe. And if we plug this in, this power bar should not be powered. The power bar not powered, that's good. Now

let's plug in the relay board. It does need its own source of power, specifically 12V instead of 5V this time, so we'll wire that up here. There's also a few dip switches you want to toggle on this board. We enabled TX and RX, and then the termination switch, and then we just did the termination switch on this side. That's because each of these is the end device. If you had a bunch in between Daisy chains, you would just turn the termination one on on each one on the end. If the board was mounted directly on the Raspberry Pi, we could use their command line Library directly, but instead, since it's going over serial, I had to turn off the serial functionality on there, so it's just passing through, and then enable serial on the Raspberry Pi. And in theory, hey cool, you see them clicking. Now we can plug this in. You ready? Yeah, on. See, that's L up, and then we go off. Now I've just got to make a little script to toggle it based on

the leak sensor and hope it works. So, we've done the demo where if the pump fails, the systems turn off. But what we haven't demoed is if a leak sensor gets triggered, the pump turns off. Well, let's do it. Okay, I'll go lick a leak sensor. 5 volts, not going to hurt. I've licked a battery before, but how many amps is it? 5 amps? It's fine. 5 amps? Yeah, I wouldn't lick that. I'm going to lick it. I wouldn't lick that. I'm going to do it. Well, make sure you get it on camera. Yeah, yeah, fine, fine. I won't lick it. I'll just dip it in the water on the floor. Go for it and dip. Oh my God. All right, we've got a light on that same power bar. Oh well, did the flow stop? I mean, yeah. Okay, now let me unlick. Okay, obviously we have to fix up the wiring here a little bit. Is it going and she's gone. Hey, so theoretically, well, there's a lot more

protections than there were before. Most of them are just sitting on the concrete floor, so if it leaks, I'm sure they'll work great. I have a box, we'll put it all in a, we'll make it nice, you know. It also works great pway, who sponsored today's video. You should try a free trial of pway today, and as a member of our audience, you can save 40% on all of Pulse's plans. Just go to lmg Dogg lt24 or click the link down in the description. Thank you so much for sponsoring this video. Pulseway is your solution for Remote Management of all manner of systems, not just janky basement water-cooled ones. Yeah, we built our own monitoring system and then used Pulseway to do all the system stuff, and they have a fully-featured mobile app so you can diagnose and even fix problems on the go. Yeah, like if your pump stops working, yeah, you'll know even when you're in France. Windows updates, temperature monitoring, you won't be able to do

anything about it disc usage monitoring, but you'll know. No, you can call your team, get them to do. Well, you think I'm going to come to your house and fix your water tooling while you're in France. It's the Pulseway pitch. Oh, that would be helpful.

The Big Leak WAS my fault… maybe

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Troubleshooting a Liquid-Cooled Gaming Machine Leak

A custom liquid-cooled gaming machine leaked, causing water damage to other systems.

The leak was due to a fitting corroding off the block, despite the owner's precautions.

The issue was exacerbated by a voltage difference between systems, leading to galvanic corrosion, which the owner is now addressing with an isolation transformer for galvanic isolation.

Setting Up Grounding and Monitoring for a Server Rack

An extension cord is debated for its length, but it ends up reaching the necessary plug.

Grounding the server rack is prioritized, with grounding leads and a bus bar used for connection.

The panel is opened to tie wires directly into the grounding bar, and grounding kits are used for easy disconnection of servers.

Water Leak Detection and Prevention System

The system uses voltage sensing to detect water, with a flow sensor to monitor water circulation and a float switch to check the water tank's fullness.

Corrosion in a faulty hose bib caused a leak, leading to the need for a custom valve and a particulate filter.

The setup will be managed using a Raspberry Pi hat with 16 universal sensors, allowing for comprehensive leak monitoring in multiple gaming computers.

Setting Up a Raspberry Pi with a Control Board

The control board for the Raspberry Pi offers various features, including sensors, power outputs, and MOSFETs.

It requires a separate 5V power lead and has a battery for real-time clock and hardware monitoring.

The setup also involves a pull-up resistor to ensure the sensor reads the correct value, and a script is written to interpret the data from the flow sensor and send it to the Pulseway API and Home Assistant for workflow management.

The flow from the pumps is low, with the outdoor loop at 5 L per minute and the indoor loop at 10.

Grounding issues were resolved by placing screws, but the panel still needs proper grounding.

A leak sensor was wired up with a pull-down resistor, and it successfully registered voltage changes when bridged and exposed to water.

Using Pulseway for Sensor Data and System Management

Pulseway allows for the attachment of custom data to systems and sites, with the option for global use.

The API enables real-time data updates, and the Pulseway agent can be installed on a Raspberry Pi for monitoring.

Custom fields are created in Pulseway to track flow rates, and workflows can be set up to shut down machines in response to specific conditions.

Controlling Water Pumps with Leak Sensors

The system is designed to shut off the water flow if it goes below one liter per minute and can also turn off the pumps in case of a leak.

Relays are used to control the pumps remotely through an Ethernet cable connected to the sensor board.

The setup includes splicing the relay into the power bar's load wire and wiring it to a 12V power source, with dip switches toggled for proper functionality.

The demo showed that the system turns off the pump if it fails, but the leak sensor's trigger was untested.

The host humorously considered licking the sensor but opted to dip it in water instead, successfully triggering the light and stopping the flow.

The video also promotes Pulseway, a remote management solution, offering a free trial and a 40% discount for the audience.