Originally Posted by
kb0nly
Ok first off... comparing these to a CW3000 or CW5000 is TOTALLY WRONG...
The CW3000 and 5000 are nothing more the an over glorified radiator with a fan, water pump, and reservoir. I had a CW3000 taken apart, and i saw pictures of a 5000 taken apart. They ARE NOT ACTIVE COOLERS.... If you want the same performance as one of them get a couple PC radiators and some fans and a PC cooling water pump, it would cost you $150-200 for the same thing as those cheap POS's... I had a CW3000 for a while, it started rusting inside the water tank so i took it apart to clean it out, and there ain't much inside! There is a water flow switch, which only works on days when the earth is at the right rotation to the sun and the magnetic ju-ju comes into collidance and your tin foil hat is on straight... LOL... Yeah they suck. I had to modify my CW3000 so it actually worked out of the box, and then its nothing more then a radiator and a fan for the cooling, no compressor, no TEC's, nothing.
The CW5000 i saw torn apart looked the same inside as the 3000 just bigger reservoir, bigger radiator and bigger fan. Unless i'm missing something i didn't see active cooling them either??
Those units will only cool the water down to room temp, thats it, so if your room is say 74 degrees and the water coming out of the laser is higher it will cool it down to room temp, but thats it.
These ThermoTek units are a CHILLER, not a cooler. They use Peltier's to actively chill the water, not just cool it to room temp. You can actually refrigerate below room temp with these. I ran my laser again tonight, cut about three hours at 10mA and the temp of the water coming out never went above 65 degrees, the temp going in was roughly 61 degrees with the ThermoTek set to 16C. I was playing around with it and just kept setting it lower and lower to see if i could push the output water to below 68 and its clearly quite capable of doing that!! Only a 4 degree difference between the manifold temp of the chiller and the output temp after running through the tube while cutting. That's pretty darn good! My CW3000 that i had could only get it to room temp, so it would sit around 73-74 degrees, sure it kept it at room temp regardless of cutting length as long as the room was also kept cool, but that's just not acceptable because the warmer the tube is the shorter the life.