Monitor stand with integrated hand warmer
I’ve never been one to feel the cold, especially in my fingers but this year has been different. My desk at work is positioned near two doors, both leading to different parts of the factory. And the thing about our factory is that it’s cavernous, open and un-insulated meaning it offers little protection from the cold in winter.
Joking around with a colleague gave me the idea to use the waste heat from my PC to warm my hands so I thought i’d give it a crack! Below is my first attempt. I laser cut a corner stand so my monitors were level, whilst a box sitting atop the PC ducts the heat from the top mounted radiator into the stand and out the front through the whale tail vent.
The only problem was, the piddly amount of heat coming out the vent in my general direction had hardly any impact. Since it was mostly my left hand which spent a majority of time on the keyboard, I changed the vent design so that it concentrated the air flow and could be repositioned for maximum effect.
This vent has a cap with a series of slots that can be rotated and extended, whilst the whole assembled can be rotated at the elbow, and the shaft and be inserted or extended from the outlet fixed to the monitor stand providing a considerable range of adjustment.
Here’s the whole thing below. It’s not the tidiest desk, but it’s so much better than before!
As for performance, a very gentle breeze can be felt but it’s not really enough to make a huge impact although there certainly is potential. The first problem is that the CPU is only stressed intermittently, with a lot of the heavy workload handled by the graphics card which exhausts from the rear of the case rather than the top. It can be artificially stressed to generate heat by running something like folding at home in the background although that can be rather tedious managing for when the processing power is needed for actual work. The size of the ducting is probably too large for the amount of air flow resulting in low pressure and the heat being dissipated too quickly.
I’ll try narrower ducting first and report back soon!
