Water cooling led lights

[theboomboomcars]

I find LEDs cool, and have been intrigured by all the DIY LED builds described here. One common theme I have seen is the need to make sure they are atiquately cooled. Which lead me to think of using the water from the tank to carry the heat away. It seems that using some flexible copper piping coiled about the heat pad on the LED attached with some of the thermal adhesive used with attaching heatsinks to processors, should get enough conduction to heat the pipe, running water through the pipe will cool the pipe down, heating the water up.

It seems this could reduce the amount of energy needed to heat the water from the heaters a bit when the lights are on.

Would this type of system work?

 

[streetunity]

would this work for cooling yes, is it really going to drop your power consumption now, you'll still need a heat block on the LED to distribute the heat to the water pipes, and the water is going to absorb heat, lights already give off heat which heats the water as a bi product and since in water heaters are thermostatically controlled, they shut off when the temp is right, i think the amount of heat you'd gain from your "cooling tubes" would be trivial, but the concept of smaller heat blocks, and no fans is intriguing. only problem is you're talking about pumping water out of your tank to cool a light, giving yourself one more failure point, if something went wrong you'd be spraying your precious tank water all over the place. just my 2cents

tl;dr plausible concept, not worth the risks for gain

 

[theboomboomcars]

I would agree that the amount of heat captured would be very minimal. I am not sure how much energy is lost to heat from an LED, but even if 80% is lost to heat, most LED systems seem to be between 50 and 60 watts, so we are looking at 40-50 Watts of heat potentially picked up by the water, Since the water won't pick up all of the heat, some will still be dissipated into the atmosphere if we can get even 50% of the waste heat we would get about 20 watts, which is enough for a 5 gal. But that is 20 Watts that was paid for that is going to heat the room, which may be sued to do some work. It probably wouldn't be cost effective unless you happened to have quite a bit of copper tubing laying around.

I wonder if the flow through a drip system would be enough to use the drip system tubing to help cool the lights. Since most pictures I have seen of drip systems are using copper piping for carrying the water for much of the way to the tank.

This would be more of a project to do for the sake of doing it, and trying to direct those 20 watts to be a bit more useful. instead of just heating the room.

The most cost effective method of cooling these silently would be to get some of the nicer CPU heat sinks and use those to pull the heat away, since they are designed to move 150Watts or so of heat away with out a fan, the 10-20 watts from the lights shouldn't be a problem.