News

Dear user of EK products,

EK Nickel plated products have been under lot of public interest recently due to reported flaking issues. This is a short statement to summarize the important points and conclusions from research done recently. In our statement there are also links to technical papers covering the issue in depth. We hope this will clarify the situation. EK promises that we will pursue this issue furthermore.

EK Water Blocks Company has been working on the Nickel Plating issue for over 3 months now. Let us say that any test with nickel is a long term project, if we want to be thorough.

We chose technical institute Jozef Stefan which is well known worldwide to check our samples. Their test report can be found here.

We have also made internal tests of 5 different coolants in an identical hardware setup.
What we found in summary is that:
1. Certain chemical additives based on pure silver and Copper Sulphate that were added to the loops all of these cases have made distilled water electrolytic and with its properties they caused corrosion of nickel plating.
2. Most of the threads on the forums have stated nickel-plating flaking off, while research have disclosed there was no flaking involved whatsoever.

Effects of these additives were not commonly known. EK is sure that users are using them in good faith. Due to only until recently confirmed effects of these additives to nickel plated blocks, EK have decided to fully replace products with damage nickel plating in order to support customers of EK products.
You will get a specific EK RMA form from your reseller which can be also downloaded here.

To get the RMA product replacement you will need to follow these steps:
  1. Fill in RMA form
  2. Make pictures of the block (front, back and corrosion close-up)
  3. Send RMA form, scan of original invoice and 3 pictures for each block to EK support e-mail.
  4. We will then inform you where to ship the damaged block(s).
  5. EK support will inform you from where your replacement block will be shipped to you (in most cases it will be shipped from the location where you bought it)
  6. The customer should arrange shipment to EK or EK reseller with Economy shipping option. Express shipping is not requested. EK will pay the shipping costs based on receipt scan sent to support e-mail with RMA # in paypal payment, or credit in EK Web shop. (updated on June 14^th)
  7. Customer will get the block replaced and cannot ask for a credit note nor replacement for another product. Only thing that we allow is that customer can chose to replace the product for non-Nickel-Plated block – copper version.

Therefore until further notice EK Water Blocks Company recommends, not to use distilled water silver in the loop in combination with nickel-plated blocks, nor additives based on Copper Sulphate.

EK recommends only coolants with anticorrosion additive, although our internal test systems of pure distilled water have been found without any problem in 2 months test period. EK Team would like to ask you to kindly spread this information as we would like our users to continue having excellent experiences with EK products.

EK is lifting the RMA limit on corrosion to full 24month from the end-user purchase date without any limit. (updated on June 14^th)

Edvard König