Water Cooling..... With NO Radiators 

As an Aircon engineer, I'd suggest a few ways to make it work better. 1) Maximize the surface area per volume of fill material, you want as much surface area per unit volume to make it compact. This is probably some tournament worthy of another season. 2) Use a spray nozzles, the water droplets should be small to enhance heat transfer, use a mist eliminator if needed to avoid water droplets leaving through the fan. 3) Typical commercial cooling tower run at water-to-air ratio of 1.2 ~ 1.6 kg water /kg air. Try to build a relationships between a) Pump speed to water flow b) Fan Speed to airflow With the relationship known you can play around with water-to-air ratio to maximize your cooling performance.

The bong tower

Another idea might be to use an ultrasonic evaporator to force atomization and then recover moisture through adhesion to cooled surfaces.

You should use these mist nozzles for garden hoses / shower heads. They should create tiny droplets and therefore a lot more surface area for evaporation. Also, to work with filters next time, you can try to have the fans at the bottom pushing up, with pressure-optimized fans, and just have filter material in front of the fans.

Honestly, this is cool enough to be its own series

A liquid to liquid heat exchanger would be a really smart investment on this system so you don't bring that dust into the processor.

If you were getting no sleep before, leave it to the community to find a way for you to get less. Great video, you really put in the yards with your work and I for one appreciate it.

We used to do this back in the late 90s early 2000. We called it "bong" cooling. Works great, creates a humid atmosphere in you room. If you put a return pump(s) on the side at an angle you can get a really good vortex going that will increase the heat exchange. also try a shower head at the top. You need to make it taller and get the water from the showerhead to spray so it evaporates.

Make your connecting rings between the tubes also contain the rails on which the infill sits. Basically run three or four legs up and down from the connector rigs with ledges for the fill plates to sit on. You can also make the connector rings a fill plate in and of themselves. That way you have the connector ring is a fill plate Plus a fill plate both above and below each ring held in by those legends so they can't go anywhere.

I had a passively water-cooled gaming PC back in 2005ish. I think the cooler I used was the Zalman Reserator 1 V2, IIRC. It was basically a big external tower with fins running down the side to help dissipate heat. You should see if you can get one of those for when you decide to go for round three, I bet it could be fairly easily adapted to what you're trying to do.

The simple fact that it worked is amazing to me. I'm sure with some work it could become a zen piece of furniture while fueling your epic gaming

Ever sense your first video over this tower cooler. It's stayed in my head for a very long time. Glad you have done another one

I'd love to see this idea expanded on yet again. More fill density (I get what you mean about the aesthetic side, but I think you could definitely cram more in before it starts to look like a solid lump), spray nozzles (which may require a stronger or secondary pump), and maybe additional fans for improved airflow (could do 4 fans arranged to form a cube that exhausts out of the sides). Also if you didn't do it already, probably a good idea to seal all the gaps with silicone, just to ensure that the fans are pulling all of the air from the bottom, not though any small gaps. Honestly, I think this is an interesting enough idea to explore further. It'd be cool to see what it could achieve with all you've learned from previous versions.

Tech Ingredients channel have a good PVC dual stage evaporative cooler you might want to look into. Also, you're getting a fair bit of cooling from evaporation, so it would be interesting to know what the difference in coolant volume is both before and after testing.

Might as well just build a wall fountain, At least esthetically it would be a lot nicer but might need to make it fairly large to be effective, and you'd have to deal with dust and keeping track of the water level. For an alternative material to put in the column you could use the sheets of material that go in swamp coolers, its designed to do this exact thing and you ca buy it at the hardware store.

can i just have like a 5 hour video of the water tower trickling? it's so soothing 😌

Should get some of the metallic filament for the discs inside. Also you can try embedding magnets in them so you can adjust the positioning from the outside using more magnets.

Perhaps using raschig rings instead of those distribution plates would work better. It massively increases the surface area. You can easily find ceramic ones used for distilling. Or even print a whole load of them.

this actually could work for normal setup if you use a water to water heat exchanger to keep the evaporating water supply separate. Could be nice, like one of those desk fountains very tempting....

In the early 00's we just used 120mm PVC pipe with a Y piece on the bottom and an shower head on top, have the fan blow in air through the free arm of the split piece and you could achieve sub ambient water temperatures when running without load.

You might be able to just pack the entire tube with fibrous material that would allow a huge amount of surface area and slow flow. Just maybe put a "shower head" at the top to distribute the paths through the material.

Ah, this takes me back. I made a similar evaporative cooler with PVC plumbing pipe and scotch brite pads to hold the water and allow evaporation. I had it cooling a dual-CPU Athlon XP system. Had to refill it every day - it worked fairly well but wasn't that practical given how much water it went through. Yours is a lot more aesthetically-pleasing!

Hey love this concept has some merit for a TEC project I'm working on. Just a thought re your surface to water / air ratio, you might like to try a bunch of small plastic balls and just fill the towers with them. At a stab I would suggest approximately 15mm to 25mm diameter. Should aid the whole cooling process quite a bit 🙂.

This reminds me somewhat of a bong chiller I made about 15 years ago that I had outside and plumbed into my house. The cooling results from a 8 foot bong chiller are phenomenal. :)

That setup looks like it would benefit from quick disconnect fittings. That would also allow you to remove it from the loop and still use it as a bong. That way when you hook it back up to the PC, the bong water will circulate through the system and give you HIGH frame rates.

These used to be called "bong coolers" and were used for cpu overclocking back in the pentium 3 and early Athlon days. With a 50-60w cpu, the shower head and pvc pipe type could cool the water below ambient and thus allow for what in those days was extreme overclocking. They were also relatively cheap back when dedicated PC radiators were rare and expensive. I think by about 2002 or so CPUs used enough power that they were no longer used much.

Love this unconventional water cooling.... could you try stackable plate HEX instead of radiators? I believe you'll need 2 loops (hot/cold) for the setup

Garden irrigation and cooling systems have a "misting" head that forms a fine spray. Combine that with the fan at the top, and you get something similar to a jet engine. Another option would have a water fountain at the base, and a series of condensation plates in the column. Water from the plates is recycled to the PC - looking a lot like a fractional distillation setup.

Use a power station cooling tower as a model, spray heads at the top with upflowing air. If the droplets are small enough, you don't need anything in the column. And just filter the water with an in line filter. You can also put a grid just above the bottom of the pool to encourage sedimentation

Used to play with these in the early 2000's. What you want is as small dropplets as possible spread as uniformly as possible and you want them to free fall against the airflow as long as possible. Designs back then where otherwise quite simple and similar, just a collecting reservoir on the bottom with pipe to the PC and pretty long and wide tube (I used to have 1,5m 300mm PVC tube as the "rain tube"). The top part is the difference, we didn't go for direct airflow because we used the very top to diffuse the water (1-4 pipes from the PC pushing water to small PVC pipes at the very top with holes on the under side and under them a diffusing layer that was just a PVC cap with a ton of small holes through which the water just barely dropped down to the pipe). I used to have 2 fans in their own pipes separating from the rain pipe to upwards to the sides so water couldn't be pulled into the fans directly. The true art came from tuning the fans. In the best case the airflow needed to be just rightly distributed so the dropplets don't get flown around in the pipe and hit each other and grow in size, so as stable and directly down to up as possible. The second part was the force of the airflow, you wanted just enough that the dropplets don't fall straight down but they fall slower because the airflow because the longer the dropplets fall, the colder they get. I would recall some people who put way too much time to it managing to get the water returning to the PC being subambient temperatures. But the whole thing fell to the history once someone found out you could just use a small intercooler and strap fans to it instead of this huge rain tower and we got closer to the modern watercooling (we were still cooler because having the cooler within a case is such a limitation, just drill couple holes to the back, get rubber grommets for them and bring the cooling outside, you can even dunk the cooler to a fishtank and water cool your water cooler).

Way to think outside the box,... or case! I really like the idea of hearing flowing water versus flowing air, very zen 😇

The key point here - hot media/cold air surface area size. You need to increase it at max possible level. So here is some strategies to reach it: 1. Make thin streams of water through small (up to 1...2mm nozzles). But it will may need pump with high enough compression (between PC and nozzles). 2. Make freefall water droplets. This will require more nozzles to achieve required flow. 3. (Most promise) Make your own radiator for controlled surface size at wide range of flow - push a water through an array of plastic tubes for drinks. It`s easy to calculate requried number of tubes for your application. Coz these tube has a very thin walls (0.15 - 0,30 microns) - high enough result heat conduction. Because it`s tube - easy streams and air control.

This was very thoughtfully constructed and a ton of fun to watch, thank you!

@Major Hardware for me the whole point of this Vapor cooling is - simplicity and only problem is sound. Your approach fix what is working and do nothing with problems. You have basically 2 solutions for PC Vapor cooling -> A. Use shower towel on a simple horizontal PVC tube with holes to spread the water by soaking and use couple of fans for cooling, B. Use simple shower head to spread the water on fully open air. Your more industrial approach have place in a very large scale, when volume of water in the system and whole scale of the system should be optimized to a reasonable scale, but you still have a PC water cooling that makes you want to pee all the time. Also there is C. option, to vaporize and condense water with sound waves, like Ultra sound, this is how electric air humidifiers work.

It's like a swamp cooler. That's what we had when we lived in dry Nebraska as a kid instead of refrigerant cooling like normal air conditioners.

I very long time ago, I used I "Y" fitting on 4" pipe. 1.5' going down into a bucket and 3.5' going up in the air. Using a rain type of fitting for a kitchen sink at the top of the pipe and 3 92mm case fans stacked on top of each other connected at the "Y" fitting I was able to leverage evaporative cooling. This was all sitting in a 5 gallon bucket with a fountain pump cooling my Duron 900. Another way to increase your surface area is to use scotch bright pads(maybe you can find white ones), I actually enjoyed the rain cooler. Cool to see the same concept used twenty years later.

I made one of these 20 years ago, but I went for attached flow to the walls of the pipe. I accomplished it by lining the walls of the pipe with one layer of cotton towels. Then I had a smaller pipe with a fan that went inside the big pipe, that way it could pull air down into the pipe and back up the smaller tube. It was quiet and cooled my AMD CPU. Downside is it used quite a bit of water and stuff would start to grown in the water, you might have to address those issues somehow.

You should do a video on cleaning your loop, trying various things to flush it, and using a boroscope camera to get in up close to the parts we can't normally see, like down the fitting hole of a radiator. For instance, one of my ideas is to pour drain cleaner into the radiator, let it sit overnight, then flush with water until clear. Possibly other things as well, like Isopropyl alcohol and automotive paint solvents. Then move on to stuff that should be more compatible with the plastic and acrylic bits of your loop, once you think the radiator can't be cleaned any more.

Tech Ingredients does a few videos on water-tower evaporative cooling. Almost the same idea with fans blowing air from the bottom up, into a shower head.

You can also filter the water by adding a 'resting pool' similar to Moors filtration technology used in Andalusia back in 15th (not sure when was that) century. It is basically a relatively large reservoir that has a certain depth and relatively high intake and outlet spots (for example 2cm radius ports work on top of a 14cm deep 25-30cm long pool). Idea is if you put your water flow thru a very deep reservoir, all the particles brought by the water will seep down and you can collect cleaned water from a high spot. Ideally you'll need a cleaning mechanism/scheme for the bottom end, if you make it open top like the original it will help with cooling and finally if you make it just right you can use it as a master waterfill/drainage reservoir as well. It'll take a lot of space, it'll be heavy and potentially messy but an absolute spectacle if you're up to tackle :)

I was just about to research how to do a more efficient evaporative cooler for a project of mine. I plan on integrating your fill design with my cooling towers. Instead of an upper fan try using an aquarium air pump in a lower section of the tower. This way you have a positive displacement system, relatively speaking compared to a fan. If you plan on sticking with a fan suction design, use a fan designed for radiators.

Coolingwater specialist here: to improve your design the only thing you need to do is increase the surface area. You could do this by printing a circular lamellafilter, which fits in the full length of your clear acrylic tube. More surface area equals more evaporation, upto a certain point of course.

I remember people making coolers kinda similar to this 15-20 years ago with the water getting slightly cooler than ambient. It was constructed from just plain old grey pipe and shower head at the top and a 45 degree piece in the middle facing downwards with the fan blowing air through it on the water dropping past it all the way from the top to the bottom without any middle grills or anything.

Aquarium bio balls would probably work excellent to fill the tube

I dont know why I like these somewhat overly complicated, intricate and/or unique water cooling ideas. Whether its due to the fact I want my pc to stand out a bit or just because its different I really want to go like way over the top with it one day and have a large tower like this that could sit next to the desk and look like its purely a decorative fountain. Although pumping could become an issue.

Very cool. I feel like this has potential to be quite effective with further refinement. It would be especially nice in places with dry air, since it would act almost like a desktop humidifier, and achieve better cooling via enhanced evaporation.

Loved the experiment! Also the constructive criticism of the flaws discovered on your first design . How about if you lowered the bowl down in the duct ? I think the neck of the fish bowl would be small enough for air flow .

For a very long time I suffered from the same ideas and their implementation. 1 to increase the area from which evaporation takes place, I used a bunch of different straws for cocktails, in my case 6 mm showed the best result 2 geotextile was used to filter the air - it is very similar to the material of vacuum cleaner bags 3 I used sponges for aquariums to filter water, it also made the sound of falling water drops quieter if the water level was lower than the top of the sponge 4 I used a channel fan and in order to avoid contact with water, the air supply was from below 5 since the circuit is open, the tank needs a huge one so that all the water can drain there, well, you need a powerful pump so that you can pump everything back, or you need a check valve(near exit) that creates a decent resistance in the circuit

AQUARIUM TOUR PLEASE! Is it saltwater? fresh water? cichlids? marine? i have been watching your vids and had NO idea you where a fish guy too! i must see! Please! Also, Cool tower cooler man!

I wonder if this could be done entirely passively like in real power plant cooling towers. hot water is dispensed at the bottom and spread out. That heats the air inside, which rises and naturally causes a good bit of draft cooling the water. This, if you make the water spreading out silent, could be the most silent cooler in PCs

One way or another, you have inspired me...But 15 years ago I had a similar idea....mine is simpler though...But it is based on genius physicists' discoveries...But I stopped pursuing the idea...I will make it happen this time because we haven't overcome such a thing. I commend you for trying for making something not just talking. I didn't exactly measure parameters, but I achieved a dramatic difference, just life as a networks admin and a horrible divorce got me off track...All to say don't let anything stop you from improving your design, everybody has unique ideas and you are on the right track, cheers.

I hate how much I like this, more please.

I kept looking at this and thinking "why not just use a rain wall instead"? You could easily put a rain wall in an enclosure (like a fish tank or plexiglass box) and then add a filtered intake fan and a fan for exhaust. You'd get plenty of evaporative cooling, filtered air and a lot less parts.

The best Evaporative cooling is done with Spray bars Atomizing the water makes it way more efficient

You actually inspired me with the original video to build a similar system, I decided to use a sort of "rain" shower head I had lying around and 2 clear 5 gallon buckets for mine though.

Fun idea. Use a window screen mesh to add surface area for the separation disks. Just mount them on top of the current stack disks. The finder mesh you use the more air pressure you will need. Possibly 2 fans on the top to pull out.

In process engineering we would use a filler material to distribute the water like little glass sections of pipe or metal saddle shapes or washed pistachio shells. The ultimate fillers are Raschig Rings. The trick is to maximize interaction without blocking the flows of water and air. And be carefull to not contaminate your water if you try any material.

Back in the day when we made these out of PVC pipe we used off the shelf shower heads at the top

This is pretty cool. Hope to see a v3 some day.

Did something like this around the year 2000.. Its the easiest way to get water below ambient temp. 3" pvc on top of a 5 gal bucket. Had a y flange at the bottom of the pipe by the bucket. Had one pusher fan. At the top I had a shower head. The pump was in the bucket. Just the air passing over the shower of water was enough to pull the heat out no need for all the in fill if the initial dispersion is good. After that I went to a water fountain setup to actively cool it down to around 35-40deg. Back around when the celeron 300a was around with a block I made that was. It was crude but worked like a champ.

A "rain" type shower head is what we used to use back in the 90's 🤣. Just a long 6 foot 8" PVC pipe ("reclaimed" from the junk yard for $5-10) with the shower head at the top, fan above, pump and all down below. Literally 30+ years ago this was how you beat the "heater core" people to ambient temperatures.

This is the chillest cooler I've ever seen

Imagine hooking up a water system to your entire house, where you can plug in many devices with quick fittings so you can water cool any device anywhere in your home using a big fountain type bubbler like this? That would be such a cool thing to see someone do.

You should print spacers to go between the elements to keep them flat/level. It would be awesome to see at least the top distribution plate have a rotating element, powered by the weight of the falling water. That would take some design work, but maybe a hydraulic bearing system would give an load capability on the bearing proportional to the water flow since it would power the bearing. I've seen a bearing/motor design in higher pressure systems, so I don't know how effective it would be here. But it might be worth a look.

Creating stilts for your water plates and indentations for those stilts to seat into would make it so _zero_ glue is necessary, and if you use TPU to create gaskets you can have a _loose_ interference fit using the properties of shore hardness to your advantage so the water doesn't end up sneaking through the sides of the plate. A concavity flush with the plate and TPU seal would force the flow where you want it. If you make the seals be slightly _convex_ on both sides with a rather long and gentle fillet you can have the outside-facing seal press against the tube, while the plate is held into place. Material spread would keep the plate in place _under friction_ but the stilts would still be necessary for absolute placement so water flow does not displace them. The stilts should take advantage of the TPU material so they also sort of press-fit into place. The result would be a self-holding structure able to retain water with minimal loss - _if any_ - along the sides.

A cooling tower works by evaporative cooling. You need a ton of surface area for the water to interact with the air flowing through it to get any cooling. You also need a spray system instead of just dumping water into it and trying to distribute it with a shower screen.

On the stock system, fan orientation can make a huge deal. I accidently switched a fan at the rear of my case to blow into my CPU cooler and it raised idle temps from 40c up to 75c.

I was thinking about doing something similar, before I realized I could use any of 3 legs in my old radiant heat lines to sink heat into the slab of concrete my house is built on. It was abandoned, in favor of baseboards years ago but the piping still exists! I used to work in a chlor-alkali plant, we did have chillers and a cooling tower but what you've got there is more similar to the chlorine stripper. We used small cylindrical packing material that had plenty of surface area each, packed into a column with air in from the bottom an liquid from the top, with ventilation. There was one disc at the bottom to keep the packing in. Airflow was priority, as was surface area for chemical stripping. These would, for your column have about a 1.5" diameter and length, easily 3D printed. Food for thought. I have also worked in both water and wastewater, so I have XP with flow and blinding. Maybe turn down flow and bump up air. The full column of packing material with a plate on the bottom with 1" holes will keep the packing in and allow for airflow without blinding (adjust water flow). I had also considered adding a float and a 1/4" fill line for makeup water with a float and a valve, you will lose water to evaporation (hopefully!). Looks promising, and cooling can be increased with a taller column/more packing easily. It opens the cooling loop(heating loop) as well so it's fairly ideal, just add water and air! You could even add ice to the basin to increase cooling for a bit too!

Ayyy, I'm so happy you ended up doing it, thank you!

This just needs to be a series of Build your own exotic water cooling set ups.

Chemical engineer here. Use thin, low density scrub pads on each layer. Surface area will increase by an order of magnitude.

Cool project, literally! Saw the hot glue gun and went: "Oh, no!" But now I have to pee...

Wow! Your own cooling tower ! If I may, there is two kind of cooling tower and yours is a little bit in the middle in the wrong way. You have free fall cooling tower and packed cooling tower. Free fall cooling tower have less drag (air easily pass through), but the surface between air and water is not so great. The packed cooling tower need strong fan as there is a lot of drag. But the cooling is also better inside as the surface between air and water is better. As you use a PC fan, I recommand you to: - redesign the head to have a better spraying of water. What you want is a shower of small droplets. - remove all packing inside. - replace the fan for a high pressure one. Beware that the cooling effect depend of the relative humidity of the room. Pretty project through. Have fun !

I remember reading about this is an old PC magazine in the early 2000's I think. They used a shower head to split the water up in to smaller dropets & increase surface area to maximise evaporation.

One way you can help with spreading the water is to have a gradual increase in pipe diameter when reaching the top of the tower. Second, you could use styrophome on the filter area so that even if it gets wet, it doesn't clog. Third, you could slow down the pump significantly because you gain all that extra volume in the tower. Basically it looked like you hade more water entering the chokepoints than leaving the choke points at the same time. Also you could try to change the inlet to the center of the fish bowl instead of on the side.

7:23 You know you're on the right track when you introduce the Sripol method

Missed (mist) opportunity!! 🤣 You could have put a fan inside, let the water strike the middle or the blades and it will be flung and misted , greatly increasing your evaporation and thus your cooling! Now you can have a fan blade showdown of water flinging and misting designs!!!! Probably a good idea to silicone conformal coat the center electronics.... And mount the fan hub up to keep some water out of the bearing But also be aware of the indoor humidity. As relative humidity rises during use, evaporation will become less and effective heat removal will reduce. So over time this will do a worse job unless you can keep your indoor humidity low and stable with outdoor air exchange.

that thermal dynamics module coming in clutch here

Instead of mesh discs, you could print "Pall rings" for random packing with a top and bottom retainer grate. Pall rings are used in commercial-scale for distilling and similar processes. Pall rings or other random/dumped packing would be a great way to distribute that water nicely. Combine that with a counter flow air path (air goes up, water falls down), you could probably get some more cooling mileage out of basically the same materials. you could use a y shaped branch to inject air down one leg of the y to go up the other leg of the y, in which the water is falling down. Then you wouldn't need to worry about getting the fan wet, but you could still get upwards/counterflow air. This liquid down, gas up counterflow is how it's done for the most part with chemical engineering.

A great follow-up would be a Tesla fountain, which many people gloss over before realizing its intent as a cooling tower for heat engines/boilers and as an efficient means for a fountain to heat the surroundings, or take heat energy from it and cool a closed system.

That’s pretty cool. If there was two, especially in a gun metal like color, it would look like Dr. Frankenstein’s lab😂

Tower should have been a little shorter, wider and used perforated trays to spread the water into smaller drops. These work on surface area of the water. Then use a larger fan(200mm). Downside to these is water loss. It would need to have a level maintained using filtered water to prevent buildup or alternatively use a heat exchanger so tower water does not mix with loop water.

edge lighting the tube from the top down might look good, or having a lit up central acrylic tube with bubble (take apart a cheap garden bubble solar light)

This seems like it would a) be a neat humidifier / heater in the winter and b) something my can will be unable to resist drinking from

That's some clean soldering there my friend. I don't give that compliment to any but the most deserving.

Evaporative cooling media or washed expanded clay pellets. Both are designed for maximizing surface area while allowing airflow. If either is used you'll see a large amount of water disappear quickly.

Saw someone do this exact thing with white PVC piping and some fans like 20 years ago. I think his conclusion was, it works great for cooling, but falling water is loud, and it makes your room super humid.

bit late to the party maybe but I've made one of these in the distant past (I think 20-ish years ago) I used a copper pipe wound into a coil as a heat exchanger to keep the water from the tower and the loop seperate as it -will- get dirty. Only downside is you need two pumps. Back then I just used PVC piping, a Y adapter at the bottom, one straight pipe upwards with a showerhead kinda gardenhose attachment and a fan in the other opening of the Y adapter. the cooling water was usually below ambient which was pretty cool!

If you wanted to perfectly spread the water you can ridge the fish bowl and have it spin slowly with each ridge covering a different vertical section.

An idea for a future version of the bong tower would be to use spacers for the fill instead of adhesive. You would lose some ID for airflow, but everything would stay put!

Looks like it would work well as humidifier for the room at the same time. I would add standoffs to the fill to keep them spaced at whatever distance you would want them to stay at.

Swimming pools in the deep south often use a fan shaped sprayer to arc the water into the air back into the pool, used to cool the water. That's basically what you did here in a more controlled package.

I love it. So many ways to design it and who cares how it cools when it looks that cool 😎

Long term the water goes manky and the noise makes you want to pee. Done this 10 years ago with Tupperware, cool experiment. It did cool well though. A bulkhead quick disconnect system added to you case would allow you to test all kinds of cooling systems ! Mega passive radiator!

If you wanted a passive external cooler, have you tried converting a Oil Heater and moving the oil through the water block and out of the case into a large Oil-filled Radiator Heater? Have the cool Oil flow back into the water block? Obviously you would get rid of the heating element since your CPU/GPU will provide the hot oil. A QD (Quick Detach) fittings on the outside of the case should make it easy enough to move around. And there are small Oil-Filled Heaters that have their own Caster Wheels

2 improvements that I can think of off the top of my head, not sure how good they are though: - Top up port so you don't have to disassemble/pour through the fan at the top, unless you can fill through the grill in the base? then this is moot. - Spacer rings (Think hollow cylinder with no top/bottom patterns taken out of them to keep the water spreader rings apart)

This reminds me of the Zalman fan-less Radiator Tower from 2003, where I learned why you use demi water and some chemicals to prevent growth in your loop... It's been 12 years since I decomissioned my last watercooling setup. Fun times though.

This video made me curious if you were the guy who put an EVO 212 or whatever it was in an acrylic case and water cooled it. And apparently yes, you were. Man it's cool to see how far you've come since then

I once had the idea of using one of these epoxy river/ waterfall- desks as part of my watercooling loop. But it probably wouldnt have looked pretty for long with hot water steaming up. I did build an evopartive cooler from a small jar that had a showerhead inside and a fan on top. Worked good as a temporary setup but I had to fill up the water level once a day.

two things i would do. id use a misting shower head (the ones they use at some hotels) as the upper nozzle, and i would put a water filter on the output of the tower to keep any dust out of the loop. ok 3 things. i think id also use a mesh filter for the air intake. im thinking print a conical top to the base and use the outside as the filter, this will give you a lot of filter area.