DIY Pool Cooling Leak Repair and Learning Experience

Jake learns valuable lessons in DIY repairs while fixing his gaming PC after a catastrophic leak.

### Learning Through Repair: A Father-Son DIY Adventure
* 🔧 When a catastrophic leak in a DIY pool water cooling setup damaged a gaming PC, it presented a unique opportunity for a father and son to **learn together while repairing the system**.
* 💻 Despite the initial panic, the father reassured his son that a spill doesn't always mean a computer is dead, sharing that "**it might work just like the PC that we intentionally spilled coconut**" on.
* They discovered the cause of the corrosion was likely a **ground loop between the pump and the computers**, which **accelerated the corrosion process**, leading them to **clean the water blocks together**.
* 🧪 The father introduced an ultrasonic cleaner to make the cleaning process easier, explaining how it uses **ultrasonic vibrations to remove debris and crud effectively**.
* 🔍 As they assembled the GPU back together, they discussed the importance of thermal pads for heat management, emphasizing that **without them, the GPU wouldn't function properly**.
* 💧 To prevent future leaks, they installed a **leak sensor that would activate if water bridged two probes**, providing an **additional safety measure for the system**.
* 🌊 After flushing the system and replacing the coolant with G11 antifreeze, they ensured that it would **prevent corrosion while maintaining adequate cooling performance**.
* 💰 The father also shared a tip about saving money using Rocket Money, encouraging viewers to **manage their subscriptions wisely** while concluding their repair adventure.

usually it's my kids who break stuff, and I'm the one who gets to fix it. But when corrosion in my DIY pool water cooling setup caused a catastrophic leak on his gaming PC, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to flip the script. I mean, sure, it's my fault it broke, but what could our kids if you can't put them to work? And besides, what a great opportunity for some learning. Yay, learning! But Dad, my laptop's barely working. I want to upgrade to Cyborg 14 from our sponsor MSI. It's perfect for balancing class work and gaming. They're having a back-to-school sale now. Check out the link in the description. Just because you have a spill on your computer doesn't necessarily mean that it's dead. If you can unplug it, clean it, dry it off, and fire it back up, it might work just like the PC that we intentionally spilled coconut. But that's not what happened here. This system sat for hours in a puddle of water and its own corroded gunk. It should be dead, but

Somehow, miraculously, it survived. So then, no problem. All I've got to do is have my son put his water cooling back in. Right? Wrong. Because if we do that, it's probably going to corrode again. So, we've got to figure out the root cause. The best theory we have is that this was caused by a ground loop between the pump and the computers, which causes a slight voltage differential, which can drastically accelerate corrosion. Jake is actually working right now on the video that maybe you guys have seen, where we added an isolation transformer to the pumps and grounded the rack, which means, Hey, come on boy, it's time to learn how to clean a really crusty water block. When am I ever going to do this again? Hopefully never. If Jake does all of this right, probably soon. But if it happens again, we're going to be in relatively okay shape because one of the other things we're going to be installing in the boy's computer is a leak sensor. Well, what are you waiting for? Let's go. Luckily, the only things that got eaten

away were the fittings, so all we've got to do now is remove all of the gunk that was deposited from the fittings onto these blocks. Now, the bad news for you is I accidentally left my Grasso at the office, so you get to try this Mother's Meg in aluminum polish, which I don't know if it's going to work, or goof off, which I really think is not going to work. Here's a toothbrush. You'll need water. Okay, that's not doing much. Let's try some Meg polish. That's probably not what that's supposed to look like. Oh, it smells so bad. Okay, let's see. Very similar to how it did before. It really does, doesn't it? I wonder if pick action is a better bet. That does actually seem to be a lot better. Do I really want to get a dental pick into all these little bins? Well, you're not doing it. Oh yeah, I'll go get you a dental pick. I changed my mind. While I thought I had dental picks, it turns out I actually don't. But what I do

have is a lot of X-Acto knife blades. Oh wow, yeah, this comes off real good. Don't cut toward your finger like that 'cause if you put that into your thumb, we will have to go to the ER room and you'll need a tetanus shot like me. I got attacked by a cat, so fun. I wouldn't rather be doing anything else, I'll tell you what, boy. I'm nothing if not fair. You clean that piece, I'll clean these three pieces, okay? Good deal. Maybe what I didn't tell my son is there is another way. I brought an ultrasonic cleaner home. I can clean so much water block with this bad boy. Got some general purpose Ultrasonic Cleaner lemon scented. There they go. I hope I have enough for this. I only have the one jug. Extra Strength formula. This product is a concentrate, one part product with 10 parts water. I have created some work for myself. I don't even know what color the back is supposed to be, just salvage some of that back um oh.

yeah buddy, and here's some water. Why don't we kick things off with the top of the CPU block? All of this stuff was pretty easy to get the gunk out of. I actually did that before, but what's hard to get at is these threads in here. This should help with that in a big way. Let's heat it up, right? I forgot what a horrible noise it makes. Okay, let's throw this bad boy in there. Dude, ultrasonic cleaners are freaking awesome. Can I use the Ultrasonic Cleaner? Sure. When were you going to tell me about the Ultrasonic Cleaner? It wasn't. These are great. They use ultrasonic vibrations to create these little scrubby micro bubbles that will remove any debris and crud from the surface of like a water block or a piece of jewelry or whatever the case may be. Wow, not that we necessarily need it. You made really good progress. Yay, the boy can do work when he wants to. Check this out. Oh my God, yeah, sorry, that is awful. Yeah, I know. Whoa, look at it rip off this

corrosion on this bad boy. You can actually see big flakes coming off this guy. Check that out. Now it's time to pull the system, so go around to the back, get it turned off and unplugged. We're going to be doing two things. We're going to un-Jerry-rig it, so you can see I threw a replacement air-cooled graphics card in here. That's going to have to go, and we're going to add a leak sensor. Now Jake is working on the parts that'll do the actual monitoring and handle automations to turn the systems off in the event of a leak. Meanwhile, we will be installing this leak sensor. This appears to be two. Are we expecting there to be two leak sensors? They just came in packs of two. How's that supposed to sense when there's a leak? These are powered by 5V DC power, and basically what happens is if the two probes come into contact with water at the same time, the water is going to act as a wire, which is going to

connect our powered probe to our sense probe. I mean, here's the thing: like realistically, the water is going to pour out and then probably just dump down to the next server, so these sensors inside the computers, they might not do that much. Um, so we're also going to add sensors to the floor, and that'll probably be what saves us. Hey, we just got new cats! Yay! Do you want to come? The cats? Come on, let's come meet the cats. They have fleas, so they have to hang out in here for a few more weeks until they're old enough for flea treatment. And then, um, that might actually be a good thing anyway 'cause it'll give the other cat some time to acclimate the idea that something doesn't smell right. Anyway, here they [Music] are. This might end up being a side Adventure lm. g/f flat plane. Now that the new Cat Adventure is over, let's get some stuff mounted. Nice, okay, now we got to strip it. Wouldn't something like this have a strip? It does then use this, yeah, but it

only works on this part. So then you figure out what gauge your wire is. You can look it up or you can just not bother, okay? And then squeeze as hard as I can. Squeeze as hard as you can. Ow, who's my hands? Maybe squeeze harder than you can next time. It like hurts, you know? You're going to get me made fun of on the internet for having a boy with soft hands. I don't even like put product on or anything. My hands are just already soft. I am shamed. Just tell them to not shame you. Yeah, they listen to me. Why do they watch your videos if they're not going to listen to you? That's a good question. That's great. That's not going to short out on anything. Ow, my hands shamed. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to slide a little thing in there like that. Then we're going to put this down on it. Here we go. Then we slide this out and theoretically we are exactly one paper width off the bottom.

now you got your screwdriver, right? Yeah, okay, we need to remove this power supply, man. We have a lot to do. I should go check on the ultra. Oh, it stinks in here. Oh, you're going to put those in there? Yeah, why not? You can just drain it out of here outside. Yeah, but I don't want to drain it. I want to maybe use it for some more stuff. Maybe I could clean your mom's jewelry. Would you ever even know how scuffed this was? Ow, ow, ow. Okay, wow, that looks like freaking not quite new but certainly a lot better. This is great. Check this out, Jake. Huh, huh, huh. That looks pretty gross still. What? No, that's copper. No, I meant all this. Can I see, please? Yeah, yeah, she said please. That's a magic word. No respect. What the? There's still some Sho in here, so we might have to do another Quick Pass while this is all still really soft and easy to get out. And then maybe we'll throw it in the Ultrasonic Cleaner again. Now is a

perfect time to put our GPU back together. I did have to scrape some of this manually, but after the Ultrasonic Cleaner, man, does it ever come off easily. Since my GPU block is now clean, I'm ready to start putting my graphics card back together. And the good news is all of my thermal pads survived. What are thermal pads? Well, here I can show you. They're stuff that makes heat, and we want to move that heat away from it so that it doesn't get too hot and die. But because they might be mounted a little bit higher or a little bit lower, we can't just put a piece of metal right against it because our piece of metal is going to be perfectly flat, and it might not make contact with all of them. So, a thermal pad, it's like a little pad that is thermally conductive, so it can carry the heat through the pad and into our metal. You know how your computer runs games really fast? Mhm. Without thermal pads, he no working. We got to make sure that this o-ring doesn't get crushed if

this gets crushed. It has anything in the way, uh, pretty much game over. Okay, you guys, I asked for pipe cleaners. I mean, that's a pipe cleaner. I know, but this is an arts and crafts pipe cleaner. What pipe cleaners do I use? I'm trying to clean the threads, so the inside here, and they bring me the fuzzy kind. I'll show you this one. Yes, this, but a small one. Oh, that guy. Oh, no boy way. Oh, he let the O-rings fall down. They're everywhere now. There were five when I put them in. Well, where's the fifth one? Oh, I think it went down the drain hole. Yes, it's there. Okay, good. Okay, well, no, don't put them there. Put them in here. Let's get this thing assembled. Let's go. I didn't take this one apart, so I don't know where they go. They go where they go. It occurs to me as I'm sitting here thermal pasting this GPU for reassembly that we don't actually know that it

still works while nothing else in the system failed. I don't think we ever actually tried booting it with the original GPU, so now I would never recommend running a water-cooled GPU without any water in it. But hey, it's the do as I say, not as I do show, right? Let's see if this GPU works. If we get an output, I'm just going to throw it in the system and call it good. Hey, look at that, we got an output. Let's go ahead and throw the system together. Oh, this is exciting. Might be a good time to get some of these tubes out of the way. How bad are these? Some of them don't even look dirty inside. Should I just replace all of them? I feel like I should. I feel like I should just replace all of them. Actually, before I do that, I should test our new power supply bracket and make sure that it works. Uh-oh, so perfect. Uh-oh, did we leave enough clearance for the barrel jack? Oh no. Oh, it's perfect. It's flawless. Look at that, professional. So our 5V leak sensor

is going to go in there like that, and our fiber optics go in like that, and the whole thing goes in here like that. Wait, no, there's not enough clearance for the barrel jack and the power supply. New solution: no nut to secure the DC barrel jack thing because, I mean, I don't know, does it really need one? It's kind of in there right, and it fits, yay. You know what? This is kind of crazy, but because of the friction with the power supply, it's actually really secure in there even without the nut. Like, I cannot move it. All right, we're back on track. Let's get the leak sensor back hooked up. There, I spared you guys a lot of the boring details, but she's completely replumbed, and everything is ready to close up. I'm afraid I'm not optimistic enough to close up the top panel and slide it into its spot in the rack, so we're just going to huck it on the top where it was before, hook up the water pipes at the back, and see what happens.

boop boop. I don't have to power on the system in order to get liquid to flow through it, so this is a perfect time to see if anything's leaking. Everything seems fine. I mean, it should, you know, we removed the corroded fittings, but when you disassemble and reassemble water blocks, you know, you can make mistakes, right? Dude, I'm stressed. I don't remember the last time I was this stressed to turn on a computer. Let's go see if she fires up. This is the monitor that's supposed to be lit up. Give it a sec. She's memory training. Memory's trained. Oh, thank God. Woohoo. Let's see how the temps are. All right, well, I should have repasted the CPU block. You didn't repaste the CPU block? It was paste on there. Oh my God, I'm going to repaste it. I even brought PTM 7950 from LTstore.com for you. Oh, I didn't see it. In fairness to me, there was a solid chance that none of this was going to work at all, and any time we

spent on it was a complete waste. So now that I know that the thing actually works, I can just pop this off, throw some more paste on. Yeah, yeah, that's not enough paste. I'll throw some more paste on there, and we'll call it a date. Thal pad time. H temps are exactly the same. I bet the flow rate is lower from adding the filter. It's still going 10 L per minute. That's a lot, divided by seven systems. I think this might be a flow rate thing. Was it like that before? I don't think so. I mean, I can also check one of the other systems. Yeah, this one's the same. Realistically, they aren't 3D rendering on these systems, but in the long term, it might be nice to solve the flow rate issue. Maybe a second in-line pump. The more important one is the GPU anyway, so let's get that started. This one, I'm expecting to be okay. Oh well, that's great. This GPU is under 40° though, and it's pulling 220 WTS all.

right gaming systems for gamers. Do they game casual 175 frames per second in Halo infinite on medium 1440p. Oh no, oh no, don't kill me please. Oh no, no, oh no, no. Got him, oh double kill, oh dang it. Well, it's a lot easier playing on my kid's account, his MMR not as high. All right, cool, well that's enough of that, time to throw this thing back in the rack. I may have made a slight mistake. What did you do? I buttoned everything up before we actually tested the leak sensor that's in there. I can unbutton it. Yeah, all right, this going to hold. Yeah, seems like it'll hold. Okay, leak test time. What if something catastrophic happens? Theoretically, all we've got to do now is take the other end of that Barrel Jack lead, hook it into this league sensor, which you guys would have seen in the last video, and now I just pour some water in the computer basically because it failed here last time. I put the league sensor right there, so if this tube just comes flying off.

again she's right there bud. She's right there. Oh my God. Are you actually? Oh, is it off? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Computer's off. God. Okay. All clear on sensor 8, which is the leak sensor. So in theory, when you bridge these connections with water leak detected. Okay, that's a lot of water. Paper towel, please. Oh, okay. I mean, it's not that much water. Yeah, I mean, it works. It just is a lot of water for what I would like to put into a computer. Computer that has other computers running beneath it. Still registering. Still registering. Oh wow. Well, that's really good actually. I can see how it's working. You don't need water between them. Just enough surface tension on both tips and then it registers. So that means we got the distance just right on these. We don't actually need a ton of water, right? Because the chassis is metal. It's using the chassis as a circuit, which is usually a really great thing to do with your computer. Well, look, it's only 5 volts. It should be fine.

it's working 0.6. Come on, blow harder 0.4, 0.3. Keep going, I'm going to pass out. That would be funny. Oh man, laded. Oh, okay, it's clear now. If this registers a leak in the future, just come in here and start blowing on it. I mean, I was going to say, well no, I got to come in here and start, you know, ripping power out of things, but I kind of don't. Well, the UPS's I do, but everything else is going to be sh down. I did bring you brackets to move your UPS if you want to do that at some point. I probably should. In a perfect world, we'll put in some concrete anchors or something like that, and we'll just mount them to the wall over there. And then what's nice is that'll actually give me another six rack units of space in the rack. Not that I need more machines, but you never know, I guess. Now's a good time for us to change out the coolant in these systems too, just in case everything else wasn't.

enough. Make real good. Insure that she doesn't corrode again. Why is he so giddy about this coolant? This is G11 antifreeze, which conveniently is the same stuff you put in BMWs. Why does it always have to come back to BMWs with you? Like, are you on their payroll? I just looked at the forums, and everyone was like, Yeah, just get G11. That's the stuff that works good for this. So, this is the real stuff then? Yeah. I mean, most antifreeze protects most metals. This is just like a high-quality, made-in-Germany good one. Is this concentrate? It is concentrate. That's a 10g tank. Let's throw both of these in. It's blue. Wow, look at that good stuff. One thing to note is that antifreeze does technically reduce the cooling performance a bit. Yeah, it's not catastrophic though, a couple percent realistically, and we're not going like a 50-50 concentration, which is where you would really notice it. What we won't have protection against though is the

non-conductive nature of pure water. This is probably going to contribute to the conductivity. Yeah, you didn't have pure water anyways. Well, it was pure enough that that system survived. No more corrosion. Corrosion be gone. Oh, hey, look at the down there. Oh, it's so pretty. I think we need to flush out the existing stuff, though. I'm kind of thinking we stick the freshwater hose in there and leave the drain open for a while. Oh, okay. Flushing this Loop about as interesting as watching paint dry. So, you guys are just going to have to take my word for it that I swapped it out for the other coolant and take my word for trusting Dennis's saving tips by Dennis as like to Co St number one. Start by collecting sauce packet or little shampoo bottles from hotels. But what would even be better is using our sponsor Rocket Money. You might be throwing money away on subscription services you have long forgotten with Rocket Money. Canceling subscriptions is easy, no annoying survey. Number two, don't force yourself to poop at work just to save on toilet paper.

rocket money tracks your spending, so you're always in control. No need to fear running out. Okay, okay, I have enough. Rocket money has helped save its customers up to $740 a year when they use all their features. Number three, just check out rocket money at the link in the description and start saving money properly. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out the last part where we looked at the aftermath of the leak and discovered all the corroded components.

I broke my son's gaming PC and now I’m making him fix it

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

A corrosion-induced leak in the DIY pool water cooling setup caused damage to the gaming PC, leading to a learning opportunity for the kids.

The miraculous survival of the PC, despite sitting in water for hours, prompted a search for the root cause of the corrosion.

The plan includes installing a leak sensor and using an ultrasonic cleaner for efficient cleaning of the water blocks.

The narrator is using an ultrasonic cleaner to remove gunk and corrosion from the CPU block, praising its effectiveness.

They are also installing leak sensors to monitor for water leaks, with additional sensors planned for the floor.

The narrator takes a break to introduce new cats and then continues with the installation and mounting of components, while joking about the challenges of wire stripping and soft hands.

The power supply is being removed, and the ultra cleaner is used to clean various parts, including the GPU block.

Thermal pads are explained as essential for transferring heat and preventing the GPU from overheating.

The GPU is tested for output after reassembly, and the power supply bracket is checked for clearance, leading to a successful and professional setup.

Troubleshooting and Replumbing a Computer System

The author is reorganizing the fiber optics and power supply for a computer system, opting to secure the DC barrel jack without a nut due to friction.

After replumbing the water system and checking for leaks, the author powers on the system, successfully training the memory.

They realize they forgot to repaste the CPU block and consider adding a second in-line pump to address a potential flow rate issue.

The narrator plays Halo Infinite on a casual account, achieving 175 frames per second at 1440p.

They conduct a leak test for a computer system by pouring water and using a leak sensor to register any leaks.

The water's surface tension is enough to trigger the sensor, and the narrator plans to move the UPS for better organization and to create more rack space.

G11 antifreeze, the same used in BMWs, is a high-quality coolant that helps prevent corrosion and protects metals.

The concentrate form is used to maintain a balanced cooling performance.

Flushing out the existing coolant and using G11 is expected to contribute to better system conductivity and reduce corrosion.