My Unnamed Theoretical Project

[mDust]

Originally Posted by billygoat333

you know what would be cool? get one of those electric trolling motors with the propellers on em to turn this up. that would be wicked. might be a little overkill though

LMAO, that would be pretty interesting. Overkill? Yes...and I don't really need something like that breaking free from it's mount near my hardware! I wonder how many extra points I'd get for being the first person on earth to do that?

[x88x]

I feel like it might actually do more harm than good; with that small a tank, the oil would probably just get churned up a whole lot.

[mDust]

Originally Posted by x88x

I feel like it might actually do more harm than good; with that small a tank, the oil would probably just get churned up a whole lot.

Yeah, I was thinking about cavitation, convection and such...then about size and noise...then about freak accidents that potentially could piss off the guy that lives in the apartment below mine and my landlord at the same time. My lease says I'm not allowed to have a fish tank...but fails to even mention tanks of oil!
(Any apartment dwellers ever read the completely inane clauses in your lease? They're there because of people like me...)

[billygoat333]

yeah... was totally kidding. unless you could figure a way to make it work.

[nevermind1534]

Originally Posted by billygoat333

you know what would be cool? get one of those electric trolling motors with the propellers on em to turn this up. that would be wicked. might be a little overkill though

lmao Juust remember, "it's not overkill unless something dies from it"

But really, at that point, you might as well get a nice fan for 1/10th the price.

[Mark_Hardware]

Originally Posted by mDust

(other than saying 'the fans will burn out!' hehe, that's usually the first thing people point out) or even something that could be added, go ahead and post it here so it can be discussed. Any and all comments are welcome.

Actually that one site that did it ran it for over a year and never once had trouble with any fans
EDIT; this site

[mDust]

Originally Posted by Mark_Hardware

Actually that one site that did it ran it for over a year and never once had trouble with any fans
EDIT; this site

Yep, that's why I don't want people to say that. My fault for not being clear there.

I have some extremely high (like 180 or so) CFM 120mm server fans from Delta that I thought would be neat in the oil, but I think they may completely disrupt any convection currents. Maybe I'll just put them on the sides of the tank so it can fly.

[Baraspitfire]

I would suggest that instead of having water in the bottom have a more dense oil, that way there is no chance of shorting on the water, and even if you did have the fan (propeller) in the bottom you could put a failsafe such as a deadmans switch on it, so if it does lift up it turns off straight away.

[mDust]

Hello Baraspitfire and welcome to TBCS!
Yes, I thought about denser oil as well before I took my own water idea seriously. The water can't be replaced with oil because I want just the water to be dyed silver to make sort of a liquid mirror below the clear mineral oil. The dye mixes well with water but will not mix at all with oil which is perfect. If there's a dye that will work with heavy oil but not mineral oil, then I'm all ears, but I doubt if anything that specific exists.
From my own personal experiments the water stays put even more so than I expected. I'm not entirely sure that the wave action will happen as planned. I filled a small container with about an inch of water and maybe 5 inches of mineral oil and played around with it. The weight of the oil pushes down on the surface of the water much, much harder than the air does and therefor limits the motion along the boundary. My case design will be holding about the same amount of water but much more oil...meaning more weight. This means finding the right balance between 'no motion' and 'turbulent water bubbles being thrown about' is just that much more difficult. I'll figure it out though...
Oh, and no propellers will be included!
I also figured instead of just red lights I'd include several different colors so I can switch it up a bit. It's not going to be a rainbow in there, the colors will just be switchable as well as optionally being turned off...maybe even an option for red, green, and blue at the same time to make a white light. I pondered this after thinking about my old Dell XPS that had a similar color switching feature built into the bios. I originally planned on two red CCFLs, but now I'm thinking LEDs would be a better choice to allow for several colors to be installed. I'll look into it in detail before I commit to anything more than 'figuring' though.

[Baraspitfire]

It would be cool to have a larger tank around the outside, fill it with water (yes i know the complication there) and stick fish in it lol