Yan wrote:Does water cooling really use water, or another liquid?
Yes. Water has a very high specific heat and very high thermal conductivity. Basically, outside of like mercury or something, it's basically the best and is obviously ubiquitous.
Sometimes people add chemical additives as "wetters", I'm not really sure why that would be better than plain old distilled water, but it's a thing.
But, yes, it's really just water.
Yan wrote:The building where I work was recently closed because of a "dangerous spill". The spill turned out to be the liquid from a server cooling system.
Commercial/industrial air conditioning often uses ammonia as a refrigerant. That might be what that was.
That's separate from water cooling though, which isn't really like common for servers or anything.
EDIT: Like, if they shut the BUILDING down, it was probably a large like car-size commercial unit, potentially on the roof but definitely right near that buildling, that had a leak.
EDIT2: and if you need serious industrial cooling, you have giant cooling towers that use water, whether in giant loops exchanged with air or simply just evaporative entirely.
Water is the best.