Server room air con

[Guest Guest]

We've recently had issues with our Server room air con in that its not maintaining the temperature correctly. Nothing major it was set at 21 and the room was 23.

 

Had it looked at and it needs cleaning and potentially more work, just for the cleaning we're looking at £500.

 

Its 9 years old so we're looking to replace

 

We were quoted £7500 to replace the current with two units in the room and a dual outdoor condenser. I don't see how this figure was come up with as no details have been provided in terms of room size and equipment.

 

Ive never dealt with the replacement of air con before, am i right in thinking that the room size and equipment in use effects the required conditioner?

 

Does this sound right price wise for a redundant conditioner?

 

Would you recommend any installers in the West Midlands/Birmingham area?

 

Any advice is greatly appreciated

[3s-gtech]

That seems pretty mega for a server room. How big is the room?

 

I had ours in the server room replaced in 2019 after it expired. Wall mounted with condenser outside, can’t remember which brand we had put it. Was less than £2k. The room is about 3m x 6m and 3m high.

[Guest Guest]

Its probably about about 1.5m by 3m, its more of a server cupboard then room

[Chaniel]

Room size should factor into it as an underpowered unit in a large room is going to struggle. A £7.5K quote seems pretty high but might not be for 2 units if it's something pretty robust, we had one of our air con units fail and the replacement cost about £2.5-3K (not 100%, site team deals with air con!)

 

I'd go back and ask what they've quoted for and why, and then get 2 other quotes from other local companies to compare.

 

Hope this isn't coming out of your budget

[Danp]

Would you recommend any installers in the West Midlands/Birmingham area?

 

Any advice is greatly appreciated

 

We used https://www.bon-air.co.uk/about-us/ at my last school, based in Worcester, might be worth giving them a shout. They did new installs and servicing for us.

[dhicks]

We were quoted £7500 to replace the current with two units in the room and a dual outdoor condenser. I don't see how this figure was come up with as no details have been provided in terms of room size and equipment. Ive never dealt with the replacement of air con before, am i right in thinking that the room size and equipment in use effects the required conditioner?

 

So you actually have two air conditioning units, I'm guessing one as a failover? I can see that costing a little more to look after - I think our standard single unit costs £180-ish a time for servicing, so times that by two and add a bit if there's a failover bit in the middle to deal with.

 

The capacity of an air conditioning unit, if I remember correctly, is measured in British Thermal Units, BTUs. You need to match the capability of your air conditioning unit to the heat output of the hardware in your server cupboard - I think we just added up the likely power usage for each server and got a rough number to convert to BTUs. We have a similar cupboard-rather-than-a-room for our servers, and found we needed to add a circulating fan at the bottom rear of the rack to help move air back up to the top to go back through the air conditioning unit - nothing fancy, we just got a wall-mount fan from Argos and stuck it to the wall. Simialrly, our backup air conditioning unit consists of a portable floor-standing Argos unit (£400) we can stick in the doorway to the cupboard if the main unit fails, plus a temperature monitor that sends me an alert if the temperature starts to rise to unusual levels so I can get in to work and set the portable unit up.

 

While it's important to specify a air conditioning unit with enough capability, plus a bit to be on the safe side, I think the unit we originally had in there was too over-specified and cooled the volume too quickly. This resulted in the air conditioner's thermostat switching the unit off, at which point the volume heated up quite rapidly again (because we have servers putting out a fair bit of heat), so the unit kicked in again and so on, so the air conditioning unit was constantly switching on, running at full blast, then turning off, which resulted in in getting quite worn rather quickly. It would be a good idea to check any new unit was suitible to be used in a server cupboard, or at least that the c ompany installing it understands it's being used for server colling rather than cooling a room and get it set up appropriatly.

[gmonks]

That sounds quite a lot for 2 units. We didn't pay over £2k for ours a few years ago.

 

You can also get air con now where if its colder outside it will pull the cool air from outside in to the room and only switch the air con on if its hotter outside than it is inside. Some councils are now using this method and saving quite a lot of money in the process.

 

Something to consider perhaps?

[EddyAllen]

Id head on over to Appliances Direct,

 

Multi-split SmartApp WIFI Inverter Wall Air Conditioner with two 12000 BTU indoor units to a single outdoor iQool-2MS12K12K | Appliances Direct

 

Seems to fit your spec quite nicely