Mark is wrong about glauber salts: a rant

I've been waffling on posting this here because it's not super productive, and by the time I listened to the glauber salts episode it was already kind of too late, but he mentioned it in the most recent episode and I really need to put this somewhere.

At the most basic level, the system mark is proposing is the temperature equivalent of a buffer solution. A buffer solution, for those who don't know, is a solution of acids and salts that prevents a liquid from rapidly changing acidity.

Your blood has a buffer solution, because the proteins in your body work best with a pH just above seven, and outside of that range bad things will happen quickly. Buffer solutions are great when you want to be able to introduce new chemicals into a solution while keeping the pH from changing.

That sort of thing makes absolutely no sense in this context. If computers worked best at a small range of temperatures, and you never want them getting too cold, then I guess this would make sense, but considering I doubt you're cooling your CPU by leaving your computer outside in the arctic, that's just not a problem.

There's no point in making a system to prevent the computer from cooling down too much, when that's just not a concern. This system would do would be making the coolant less efficient because colder coolant works better, and ice has absolutely terrible thermal conductivity, so it works much worse than liquid water as a coolant.

Sorry for the massive rant, and if anyone has any counterpoints, feel free to reply with them, but I've run this system past a lot of chemists and physicists at the University I go to, and all of them were completely baffled.

EDIT: Alright, the man himself replied and said I misunderstood it, so I listened to the episode again. It turns out I misunderstood what he was saying. Still a bad idea though.

It seems like what Mark is suggesting is that we get a material that freezes at 70° f, and then put contained blocks of it against the CPUs and gpus and everything in the render farm that would produce heat. He also mentioned something about letting the ambient temperature freeze the packs.

That doesn't really make sense either, and Bob pointed out exactly why: heat saturation. There's a reason passive cooling (which this system is very similar to) uses massive radiators, because otherwise the heat will just build up and you're back at square 1.

He then talks about a system that Bob describes (accurately) as, "a normal water cooling setup with extra stuff that's definitely going to go wrong." I can't for the life of me figure out what the glauber salt is supposed to be doing in that setup. Maybe act as a form of thermal capacitor? But that doesn't seem like it would help.

This material is an excellent thermal battery, and I guess it could sorta do the same thing if your power went out? But tbh, if your power goes out, I'm not sure you really need to cool anything.

EDIT 2: I know it's "Glauber's salt" but I'm not calling it that. The episode is even named "Glauber Salt"