Portable Aircon recommendations

[nottsure]

Good evening,

 

I'm hoping that you might be able to help with the raising temps in our Server room (cupboard).

 

We have zero budget (so coming out of my pocket so Max £500) and it is not on an outside wall (no split AC units) and the current cooling is a vent with a extractor fan right next to it. As you can guess the room is Hot!

 

As a stop gap, i was looking to put a small portable AC unit in and venting the hot air out into the corridor. The one I liked the most is the

EcoAir Artica MK2

but checking on their website it states that it is unsuitable for a server room. Another company suggests the electriQ P15HP but the reviews seems a little disappointing.

 

Does anyone have any personal experience with these models or can suggest any others?

 

Thank you.

[Blue_Cookeh]

Good evening,

 

I'm hoping that you might be able to help with the raising temps in our Server room (cupboard).

 

We have zero budget (so coming out of my pocket so Max £500) and it is not on an outside wall (no split AC units) and the current cooling is a vent with a extractor fan right next to it. As you can guess the room is Hot!

 

As a stop gap, i was looking to put a small portable AC unit in and venting the hot air out into the corridor. The one I liked the most is the

EcoAir Artica MK2

but checking on their website it states that it is unsuitable for a server room. Another company suggests the electriQ P15HP but the reviews seems a little disappointing.

 

Does anyone have any personal experience with these models or can suggest any others?

 

Thank you.

 

I'd let stuff die or shut down to reinforce the point before spending my own money

[Shadow_Walker]

I'd let stuff die or shut down to reinforce the point before spending my own money

 

This 100%!

[Achandler]

Best solution is let it break, or get fans and open the server room door and blow the air out.

 

Don't spend your own money fixing your place of works problem, life's to short and that's not up to you to do!

[PotNoodleTech]

Absolutely DO NOT buy an air con unit out of your own money. This will reinforce to the school that you are a soft sucker and that they can get away with not giving you any money for anything as they know you'll reach into your pockets instead.

 

DO NOT DO IT!!!!

 

Secondly venting a portable AC unit into a corridor is a really bad idea as you'll basically turn the corridor into the Nevada desert. The Vent vents hot air, and lots of it and it needs to be vented outside!

 

Split air cons can have longer runs so you need to measure the distance to the outer wall and see if it's less than 10metres.

[christhetech]

Spending your own money because the school either can't or won't invest in sufficient air-con is a dangerous path to start going down.

 

If you are certain that you want to go down that road though, CPC do some pretty cheap portable Air Con units.

[SamanthaD]

Aside from the reasons above - what if you buy an aircon unit and it fails, causing damage to servers? You're totally liable, as the school can deny all knowledge and you're left with quite a large bill to pay, probably including a new aircon unit!

 

(A friend has had a wall mounted aircon unit leak onto a PSU, thankfully his smoke detection and UPS was up to the job and no major damage occurred....!)

[Dave_G]

I'd let stuff die or shut down to reinforce the point before spending my own money

 

This, but I would also ensure that I had covered my back by doing my due dillagence:

 

Put a thermometer in your server room to get an idea of the temperature, and then check this against your server manufactures environmental temperature guidelines for continuous operation.

 

If the server room temperature isn’t within the guidelines, email SLT to advise them that the servers will be operating outside of the manufactures guidelines (possibly include some of the issues this may cause).

 

Give them some things that could be done to mitigate this issue (air con, manually shutting servers down if the temperature gets too high), then wait to hear back from them.

 

Then:

I'd let stuff die or shut down to reinforce the point before spending my own money

[dhicks]

coming out of my pocket so Max £500

 

Do this, but only if properly set up as a supplier to the school (30 days credit terms are pretty standard), with 5% commision added.

 

Does anyone have any personal experience with these models or can suggest any others?

 

When our server cupboard airconditioning conked out I went and bought a couple of Argos' own-brand "Challenge" units:

 

Buy Challenge 5K Air Conditioning Unit | Air conditioning | Argos

 

They sell the one model, which saves having to make a decision. They provide enough cooling, although they do need to be vented (and you'll need somewhere for the water to drain out, too), and seem to be okay running continuously - we had them going for a couple of weeks straight this time last year, and a couple of days so far this year.

 

The "flexible hose" you get to attach to the back hasn't changed in design since about 1952, either falling off with the slightest movement or staying put no matter how much pulling and twisting you try. It's also always just too short to be useful - make sure you have lots of industrial-strength gaffer tape to hand for fixing.

 

The other model that Argos sell, by the way, is a swamp cooler:

 

Buy Challenge 5 Litre Air Cooler | Air conditioning | Argos

 

Fine for comfort-cooling, but not suitible for a server cupboard.

[speckytecky]

No way should you be considering funding it yourself. Sounds like your server location (like mine!) is mightily small. We had a fab install of a suitable Air Con unit for under £2K. Should be relatively easy to convince the budget team of the need it you get some data from the server manufacture etc.

[3s-gtech]

We bought an Electrolux 9000BTU portable unit from a local electrical store when our server room air-con expired four weeks back. It's been running flat out, in this weather, since then. Suitably impressed. Would still not spend my own hard-earned on doing this. As much as I'd hate to see our servers cook, my wages are for me. A few bit off Ebay for 99p is one thing.

[Meldrew]

Personally I would add up the value of the kit in your server room, then speak to SMT to say without proper air con costing £___, you are risking having to spend £___ on replacing all this kit. Remember the phrase 'we have no money' is never ever true. It really means we don't think your thing is more important than other thing we ARE spending money on.

 

Meldrew

[nottsure]

Thank you everyone.

 

Hint taken!

 

I'll set up some monitoring to get some solid data and present that to SLT. Guess we'll soon see if there is any spare money.

The server is only a few months old and might not see it's first birthday.

[Katy]

As a rough guide we paid £1500 + VAT for a small split system AC unit (3.5kW) which cools one of our comms rooms with a single rack with 15 switches, room is about 2m by 2m, including installation etc. It's not on an outside wall they just ran the pipework in the ceiling void of the room surrounding it.

Main server room we paid £2600 + VAT for a 10kW split system (which is the main AC in our server room, approx 3m by 6m, cooling 3 racks of equipment).

Smaller backup AC for main server room was £1600 + VAT for a 6kW system.

 

These were all done late 2014, and in the North West so have probably gone up "because of Brexit" and will be more expensive the nearer you get to London. Priced included supply installation and labour, but we had to have our electricians put the power supply in so prices don't include that.

Edited July 7, 2018 by Katy