Adventures in Glowing Computer Case Coolants :D

[Darren Dirt]

ROFL, Dan had some fun playing around with a blacklight and some fluorescent dye. quite a way with words.


CaseETC PC blacklight and UV fluorescent coolant dye
http://www.dansdata.com/uv.htm

...The green stuff they sent me doesn't look green, as it sits there, ultra-concentrated, in the tube. It looks orange. But if you add a few drops of the dye to some water, it swirls out into tendrils of authentic Springfield Nuclear Power Plant green-ness. A small stir will give you a very large amount of green water from a surprisingly small amount of dye.

CaseETC say 1/30th of an ounce (about 1cc) is enough to make a gallon (3.8 litres) of coolant glow, and they're not kidding. Most PC water cooling systems won't have more than a litre of water in them, if that.

Even without UV light, this stuff looks pretty darn green, especially in higher concentrations. It's got a peculiar gradient-greenness look about it, sitting there in a glass; hold it by a bright light and there'll be a green glow only in the liquid closest to the light.

Give it some UV light, though...

...and you get the full Predator-blood look.


Everything was going simply swimmingly, and it was time to test the dye in a real cooling system.

Until I knocked the glass dye vial off the table it was lying on, and it fell onto the carpeted floor.

It broke.

On the carpeted floor.

Don't ask me how. Splash went the dye, onto the carpet and onto my leg.

I wasted some valuable cleanup time by cursing.

Then I tried pouring water on the dye - turning the dark orange concentrate blotches into much larger electric-green diluted blotches - and mopping it up with toilet paper. This was pretty much a complete waste of time, but it did allow me to turn my hands orange.

Then I remembered that the cheap carpet in my ultracyberpunk testing room is actually carpet tiles. Hurrah.

I removed the tile with almost all of the stain on it, took it to the bathroom, and rinsed it.

And rinsed it and rinsed it and rinsed it and rinsed it and rinsed it and rinsed it and rinsed it.

This stuff washes out in water (it took soap and water to de-orange-ise my hands, but that's a quibble). What's amazing is how long it takes to do it. The water just keeps on coming off green.

After using up all of the hot water in the quite large hot water cylinder on the carpet tile and the leg of my jeans, there was obviously still dye there.

I began to surmise that the dye molecules were breeding...