Air con help

[Little-Miss]

Right, servers are stupidly hot (like i told them they would be). Now the temp is rising outside so is the temp of our servers.

 

We had some farty little fan installed to cool things down, hasnt made a bit of difference (suprise suprise).

 

Basically, its a cupboard in the ICT suite in the void under the stairs.

 

It homes the master cab, 2 servers, the internet squidy thingy, 2 UPS's and today a NAS to back up SIMS has been added (without consultation...grr). So it's a little toasty in there.

 

Office manager was appalled by the temp in there and so we now have electricians coming in to have a look about either installing an air con unit or some power points so we can sort something.

 

But it cant be that simple. Are there things you need to consider when choosing an Air con unit?

 

 

Grrrr

[sippo]

We've recently had air con put in our server room as it was getting way too hot, especially in the winter. I basically told the finance dept that if they don't buy a wall mounted air conditioning unit then the server will blow up then the school won't be able to run. I seriously put it as blunt as that, because thats how it was.

[mb2k01]

I'd forget electricians and get some specialist air con people in. They will be able to advise the best way forward.

We have a pitiful 1400btu portable solution for our server room at the minute, but with a new school being built in 2 years time (ish!) there isn't much interest in kitting it out much more than that!

[Little-Miss]

Would we be talking mega bucks if i got specialist peeps in?

[sippo]

Ours cost £2200. For a wall mounted Fujitsu 5kw unit. I have more details if you'd like them.

[laserblazer]

One of the problems I have found with our aircon is that they are deigned to work when the outside temp is higher than inside. So, as we are currently trying to get rid of the heat generated by radiators that can't be turned off, computers and kids, the temp. inside is a lot higher than out and the aircon doesn't work properly.

 

We have an engineer coming in during the hols to look at it. If you do get specialists in, make sure they understand what is needed and that aircon will be needed even if it's snowing outside.

[mb2k01]

Would we be talking mega bucks if i got specialist peeps in?

 

There's probably an argument for the opposite as well...

If you get electricians in to cost a job that isn't in their area of expertise, then the potential is there to have to add or change elements of the job at a later date. You might find for the sake of a couple of £K you have actually purchased a system not man-enough (excuse the phrase!) to do the job.

 

If you went to a specialist then they should be able to give you a full breakdown of costs and answer all of the questions you had about the system (maybe then putting you in the position of going out and getting quotations for similar kit elsewhere!)

[dwimorberg]

We've just had our pathetic bathroom extractor fan in our server cupboard replaced with a 12" Expelair unit which is ducted through the roof. Before then the server room temperature was 45C+ in the winter (Doors and windows open in the summer!!), but with a grille in the stud wall, the amount of air getting sucked through by this new fan is amazing, it keeps the temp down to a manageable 17C now which is fine by me. There's also two speed settings and a reverse option to suck cooler air in if necessary.

 

I always find aircon a bit of overkill, as does our bursar who thought it was too pricey; so long as you can shift the heat out to somewhere else and replace it with cool air coming in, it does a good job if you're on a budget. Cost around £350 fitted by local electricians.

 

Here's what we had (bottom right) and what we replaced it with!

http://dwimorberg.hopto.org/usr/openfiler/img/oldnewfan.jpg

 

-Mic

[Little-Miss]

Thats what we got. The air is pumped out into the corridor....took hours to drill through the 100 year old wall! ooh, maybe we just need a gigantic fan!

[speckytecky]

I'd go along with the posting from MB2K01 saying that it's well worth getting a proper Air Con team in. we were lucky at my Primary one of the parents set up an Air Con business a few years ago and has a wealth of experience in the business. His team installed a heat pump inverter based unit in our ICT suite which enables us to have a steady 19 degrees C year in year out. that cost just over £4K and was in my opinion money well spent.

[srochford]

If you go with aircon remember that it's not just an up-front cost; there are running costs and maintenance costs (aircon uses lots of electricity and will need servicing once or twice a year)

 

If you can get away with big fan shifting cooler air into the room then that's a lot cheaper but, as @dwimorberg has pointed out, it does need to be a *big* fan.

 

If you're just going to shift warm air from your IT suite into the server cupboard then I doubt it will work. Stirring up the air in a warm room cools people because it helps to evaporate sweat. On the whole, computers don't sweat so just blowing air over them doesn't help :-)

[Little-Miss]

ooh...interesting point!

[klop]

all i can say is we switched from a couple of fans to aircon and it's so, so much better.

temp stays roughly the same.. slight changex dependant on the temp outside i guess.. but within a degree or so.

 

we have a wall mounted job, first one though was a tad rubbish, looked the part and seemed to do the job but broke quite quickly, we then had an aircon specialist vist who installed something much better

 

from our experiences don't go for a portable one though, they're big clumsy and we found (whilst we had one while waiting for the wall mounted unit to be exchanged) the portable one to be hopeless! we ended up with fans, and all sorts together with it to try and keep things cool

 

only problem we've had with the wall mounted one though was some local kids got on the roof and gave the outside unit a good kicking.. was repaired promptly.. but is a worry for the holidays when it may not be noticed so easily (i'm term time only! )

[laserblazer]

We needed the aircon because the ICT suite gets the sun all day and is too hot to work in otherwise.

[teejay]

One word of caution with Air Con, make sure you have some way of monitoring the temperature in the server room, as when air con fails (like little chavs getting on the roof and turining off the refridgeration unit:mad:) you really do need a way to get the servers etc to turn off as they really hate the very sudden and dramatic increase in temperature.

Cost us £4k in broken gear last time as they wouldn't spend the extra £300 to get an environment monitoring kit. Got bought with the replacement kit though:rolleyes:

[rad]

I'd also recommend positioning the aircon on the opposite side of the room to the servers.

 

The last thing you want is a leaky aircon dripping onto your expensive kit.

 

Sounds obvious but in my lastplace of work they did just that, and it did leak a little too!

[INeedAUsername]

Our air con unit is too small to cool the server room - it was either £4k for a bigger air con unit or £450 for a partition wall to reduced the space..yep we chose the wall

 

Good job really, added security to the room and noise from the servers has been reduced.

 

Whilst we were on the subject of the server room, I had the windows tinted to keep sun out. it was about £400 but the room looks alot better - not a good business case but hey what the heck!

 

Its now at around 19 - 20 degrees. It reached 17.5 on the weekend sinc records began (Last Monday )

 

Hope this helps

 

STariq

[garethEds]

Got bought with the replacement kit though:rolleyes:

 

Tell me more about this..... Is it something I need? Have I seen these in the Videk catalogue for the racks?

 

Gareth

[Chillibear]

A drain!

 

If you end up with an AC system you'll need a bit of pipework to drain off the condensate from the units. Always fun and games when using portable systems! Often overlooked when scoping out an install.

[srochford]

A drain!

 

If you end up with an AC system you'll need a bit of pipework to drain off the condensate from the units. Always fun and games when using portable systems! Often overlooked when scoping out an install.

 

So true! You also need a drain which actually goes slightly down hill from the units to the outside. Otherwise you get what I had at a school a while ago where the drain pipe leaks and you basically get the condensed sweat of teenagers running down your wall. Lovely :-)

[Little-Miss]

Ewww! I did wonder about condensation...thanks for that!