My laptop is running a bit warm. Not dangerous (yet) but hotter than I’d care for, and I’m trying to take the load off the fan that’s in it.
I’ve got a Targus “chill mat” that has a pair of fans in it that are supposed to cool the laptop.
Unfortunately, the fans don’t blow up, they suck air in and push it out the back of the mat. The fan on the bottom of my laptop (an HP Pavilion ze2308) sucks air in. That means they’re working against each other.
Is there any way I can change the direction the chill mat’s fans spin so that they’ll blow up and into the cooling fan on the laptop, or am I just SOL?
If the mat is assembled with screws, you could take it apart and turn the fans around. The fan blades are directional, so it would be better to have the fans turn in the same direction.
If the fans are just little ones powered by an inbuilt DC motor, swapping their wires over should make them run in the opposite direction. This might not be absolutely ideal if the blades are designed to run one specific direction, or if the design of the device requires directional airflow.
When my laptop started getting uncomfortably hot, I chilled it down with a Roadtools Coolpad and a cheap desktop fan angled such that it moved a good amount of air under it from the side. The laptop stayed cool even when the ambient temp was over 80 degrees.
Actually, this doesn’t sound like a bad arrangement. The chill mat I’m familiar with isn’t meant to push air through the laptop. It moves air across the bottom of the computer, and out the back instead. The way you are set up means that both the chill mat and the computer are drawing in air straight from the room. If the chill mat fans were switched, I don’t think you would see any improvement. The computer fan wouldn’t move any extra air, it would just be air that had come through the mat first. If your computer was pushing air out the bottom and into the chill mat, then I’d say you were sub-optimal.
I dunno - if both the fans are trying to draw air out of the same space, there will be a drop in pressure and neither of them will perform as intended - in the case of the mat, this doesn’t matter too much, as there’s nothing in there likely to overheat - in the case of the computer, it could actually result in genuinely reduced airflow over the processor heatsink, which doesn’t have to be a particularly severe reduction in volume to turn serious.
Running with the fans in the same direction could also cause problems as it might allow them to spin faster than they are rated - which might just make them noisy, or it might wear the bearings out really fast (and that’s as bad as any other problem involving cooling failure).
IMO, the best solution would be something that supports the notebook, but has a mesh-like structure that impedes normal airflow as little as possible.
I think that would be quite a bad idea - the fan may be drawing air into a duct that points at the processor heatsink - in which case a straight jet of air would be flowing out of the end of the duct, straight onto it - reversing the flow wouldn’t make a straight jet of air come off the heatsink and into the duct - air would enter the end of the duct from a hemisphere of directions and flow of air across the heatsink would be diminished.
Not a good idea, even if it were possible. The result could be blowing dirty air across the components making it get even hotter, and causing the laptop to overheat, and even fail.