It’s winter, and I’m one of those unfortunate suckers with a shattered laser tube due to frozen water expanding inside.
I’ve got a replacement, but I’m not ready to install it yet until the weather warms up and I have a solution to prevent the same issues again.
I’ve considered anti-freeze, and I see there are pros and cons to it.
I’ve also seen a neat trick with an aquarium heater inside the water cooler, but I’m concerned it just won’t heat the system well enough to prevent freezing.
So, I had another idea! But much to my surprise I’m not finding information online about other people trying this out.
The short version is I want to set up an aquarium pump to automatically turn on for a few minutes after I turn off my laser cutter, to flush all the water out of the tube (or at least MOST of the water, enough so that frozen water won’t be able to damage it).
I have a design in mind for how to achieve this, and I have all the pieces already.
But here’s my question… before I waste my time, has anyone tried doing something like this before? Would a low powered aquarium air pump (I have a 5v usb air pump) be capable of flushing out the water from the tube?
Can anyone think of any downsides to this approach?
I can provide more details on my intended design if anyone wants to know.
And just in case anyone is wondering. I have considered backflow issues, so I’m getting 2 check valves for this plan. One to prevent water from the cooler flowing into the air pump, and one to prevent air flowing in the wrong direction back into the cooler.
Looks like neither of those products are available to me. I’m in Canada.
Perhaps the OMTech coolant will become available sometime in the next few months, which is fine since I’m not going to install the new laser tube until weather warms.
Do you have any other antifreeze recommendations? One of the reasons I decided not to go with that approach is because I wasn’t able to find a good, recommended product. Every antifreeze I’ve found which has been recommended for laser tubes has been either out of stock or not available in Canada.
Since I have the parts, I might experiment with flushing the water out anyway. I’ve seen one video of someone doing it with a more powerful compressor, seems like it wouldn’t hurt to try with a low power pump. If it doesn’t work I’ll know straight away.
Don’t know about the temperatures where you live, but I ran 50% mix of Propylene Glycol/distilled water in mine for over a year, but it’s only good down to about 15F. Pure form has a much lower freezing temperature, but is rather thick… the liters/min was cut by half with my 50% blend…
I’ve changed my coolant … might be easier to just remove the tube and ‘tilt’ it… That’s how I get the coolant out of mine… Most of these mounts seem to have good replacement alignment. I do it to mine and it’s still properly aligned… just a thought … remember you need the length in wires and coolant hoses to be able to ‘tilt’ it enough.
Is it something that can’t be shipped to Canada or is it just sold out? OMTech has the one I posted for $10 less USD, but they were sold out less than a week after I got the advertisement.
I’m on Vancouver Island, in BC. This year it got as low as -12C (10F), so it sounds like that mix wouldn’t have worked. This has been an exceptionally cold winter though.
The OMTech product isn’t available on Amazon or on their website.
Actually, as for the LS Coolflow, I had only assumed shipping from the UK would be expensive so I didn’t try, but it’s only £9. That’s probably a mistake on their website, but I’ll soon see if they will honor it
If that arrives I’ll just use that.
I’m still gonna experiment with the pump and water though. I’m excited to try it
I’ve used RV antifreeze for years without issue. This is the stuff you put in the drains of boats and RVs to winterize them. I don’t live in a cold climate but I think they are good to -50F.
I have seen posts about certain antifreeze compounds causing issues with the beam but over three different tubes have not had issues with this material 100% out of the container
I know I’m late for this but I wouldn’t recommend setting up a configuration like that unless you were 100% certain it does not impact flow rate. Depends on your particular bulb etc. Generally safe to use a dilution of ethanol I could be wrong but I think 10% is ok this will help lower algal growth and slightly lower freeze point. Your particular chiller and bulb will have the coolant speciation’s in the user manual or datasheet. Use distilled water. To be safe you could leave your pump running overnight. Coolant is ok if you really need it as long as its to your set ups specs. If running coolant change regularly I would recommend 3 months. Change back to distilled water when warm enough
