Thread: How often do I need to change my liquid coolant?

How often do I need to change my liquid coolant? If I neglect to change my coolant, will this affect the cooling performance? If so, then by how much?

Thanks!

Not sure of the specified times, six months to a year is what I have seen spouted by other water cooling gurus. As for neglecting it, it's not advisable. Your water loop will start to grow algae which will coat the inside of your water block(s) and radiator. Think of algae like dust on a heatsink. This will hamper direct heat transfer from the block(s) to the liquid and the liquid to the radiator. As I hear it, it is also very hard to remove once it's there, especially from the radiator.

So my advice would be to drain your loop if you are somewhere in the time span I have said and flush it through with clean distilled water and drain it again. Then refill it and add new additive. You may also want to wait for confirmation from someone who actually uses water cooling though, since I am only going off what I have read.

Every 6 months or so is a good rule of thumb. You will also want to disassemble all your blocks in fact the entire loop.