I feel the need to say something here, i've tried to avoid being sucked into a facebook flame war over mayhems although I have enjoyed watching the whole thing unfold!
As you guys know I work for Parvum (a little baby UK based company not dissimilar to Mayhems) and we have lots of watercooled show builds and lots of Mayhems coolant ranging from the standard stuff to pastel and aurora. Some of the rigs have been running the same coolant for 3 years, even the 'not 24/7' original aurora. I seriously doubt any attention was given to the tubing material where flexible was used or cleaning radiators with any particular care. I can say with certainty nobody ever tested or balanced PH levels! But they are all still running without failure, performance hasn't fallen off a cliff to the point where they can't function or components are damaged. I wasn't around when they were filled but in general I would say the coolant is still more or less the colour it started in all of them, pastel reds may have dulled to a slightly raspberry hue but they are definitely still distinctly red way beyond the lifespan expected of any coolant.
Completely independent of Parvum or any endorsement I built my own watercooled rig for the first time 15 months ago, I chose to use all EK nickel/plexi blocks, alphacool radiators and full acrylic tubing. The radiators I cleaned out with regular tap water followed by distilled water just by shaking them about and letting them drain. When it came to coolant I decided to use EK ekoolant blood red premix which I ran for an entire year. Over time it lost a tiny bit of vibrancy but fundamentally looked the same, nothing was stained badly and I was very happy. I rebuilt the rig in a Parvum L1.0 adding two more alphacool rads, admittedly I was working to a tight time frame and may not have been as thorough but attempted to clean them in the same way as before. After making all new tubing I re-assembled the loop, this time with some EK-ZMT tube in the pedestal and filled it with Mayhems X1 blood red premix, it wasn't sponsored but was all OCUK had in stock the week I needed it. Initially it looked great if not better but after only 3 months it turned well towards purple. Since then i've refilled it with EKoolant and I guess I will see how that goes. It may well only do a few months for all I know right now but i'm intrigued to find out.
I don't blame mayhems at all, it was a minor irritance to have to change the coolant, if it's something I have to do every 3 months to keep the rig looking bottle fresh blooed red and 1337 then that's fine. Performance the entire time has been great and now it's back with fresh coolant it looks great again even to my pedantic eyes. And it was probably my fault adding new rads in a rush, hopefully things will settle down and I can get a lot longer life out of the new coolant. I'd be interested to hear a sincere comment from Mick about it but after seeing how some of the rigs go together at work and the endurance of mayhems coolant I expected it to be fine. I mean really it was fine, thousands of people looked at it without passing comment at insomnia, I just knew it didn't look as good as it could do by that point.
Keeping a volume of water opaque vibrant yellow which gets hot and cold daily while still delivering good thermal performance is a tall order and I don't expect the coolant in Lightning to last forever, or for a year even. But when it stops looking totally awesome then I will change it
JR
