Planed server room cooling, think this will work?

R

Red Squirrel

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Right now my server "room" is basically the basement as there is not much partitions other than the laundry/furnace room.

I plan to enclose and insulate the server room in order to make it cleaner, less dust, and less noise. For cooling I want to take a hot/cold isle approach where I will seal off the front and back of the rack as well as fill in the unused space. There will be a door of sorts to get to the other side, or perhaps just a wall and have two doors for the server room.

I have two ideas for cooling, first one is this:

Have an air duct with 6" pipe and a 6" inline fan to suck air from the hot isle, pass it through a radiator and then back into the cold isle. The radiator would have water pumped through it and then that water would be piped though my floors, like it would in a floor heating system. The final part of the loop would go to the crawlspace under my garage which is fairly cold. Used to get frost in it before I got it insulated. But it's still fairly dead air with no heat going to it.

The second idea, probably simpler to implement:

Have the 6" duct directly from the crawlspace under the garage into the cold isle. An exhaust vent with fan on the hot isle would exhaust the air into the furnace return duct or other area causing air to get sucked through that vent.

The air vent going into the cold isle would also have a furnace filter in order to try to keep the room as dust free as possible.

Also is it more effective to have positive air pressure or negative? ex: should I be pumping air into the cold isle or sucking air out of the hot isle?

I know I could just put AC but that cost much more money to run, and I rather make use of the heat generated by having it go in living space, instead of wasting it. If ever I get central AC, that would compensate in the summer.

Right now I'm using under 400w but I'd like whatever system I go with to support more if needed.
 
i dont think youre gonna heat anything with 400W. maybe if you get to about 2000+... you will probably lose at least half that heat to inefficiencies in your cooling solution, so you might be left with under 200W to cool your home.
 
Not too worried about how much it will heat the house as I know it probably wont be much, but as long as I can get the heat out of the server room faster than it can accumulate while not wasting it. I could easily just pump it outside and pump outside air in, but to me, if I'm paying money to run the servers AND heat the house, I may as well use that heat even if it's a small drop in the bucket.

I will probably also have a HRV type system at one point too but that will most likely come later. For the fan I'd be looking at something like those inline bathroom fans. Some weed grow op stores on ebay seem to sell them a lot too. :D
 
Not sure on efficiency, but from a cleanliness point of view it is better to push (filtered) air in, rather than suck it out. Reason being is your never going to get your room completely sealed, and so you want positive air pressure inside your room to push any dust that may come from cracks/leaks or what have you out of your room.
 
It sounds like you're going to build a wall around the rack. It'd be much easier to just build one room and use a plastic curtain (google data center curtain) to separate the hot/cold sections. It will take up less space, be just as efficient and make it easier to get to the hot/cold sections.
 
SCSI-Terminator said:
Not sure on efficiency, but from a cleanliness point of view it is better to push (filtered) air in, rather than suck it out. Reason being is your never going to get your room completely sealed, and so you want positive air pressure inside your room to push any dust that may come from cracks/leaks or what have you out of your room.
Click to expand...

That's a good point, makes sense.

renixinq said:
It sounds like you're going to build a wall around the rack. It'd be much easier to just build one room and use a plastic curtain (google data center curtain) to separate the hot/cold sections. It will take up less space, be just as efficient and make it easier to get to the hot/cold sections.
Click to expand...

Was thinking that, but no idea how I'd make that and if I could get it to actually make a nice good seal.
 
Generally you want to blow cold. Your hot aisle.. isn't going to be hot, unless you're missing a zero or two.
 
That system is way more complex than you need, and there's no reason to use water. All you need is a couple of vent grilles, one at the top of one of the walls, and the other at the bottom. You can put a low speed fan or two behind the grilles if you want, but that shouldn't be necessary.
 
Remember I want this to be future proof too though, so that's why I'm going the extra mile now. I want to be able to have a few kw in there and the system still being good. Of course it will reach a point where I run out of actual cool air indoors, then at that point I'd have to have some ducts going outside too. I may do that now, and then I can have control dampers that open/close based on temp.

Going to scrap the water idea though, the more I think about it, it is more complicated for nothing. The original goal was that I can keep the same air, so controlling humidity and dust would be easier, but with the lead acid backup batteries I'm better off having air exchange anyway.

So think I'll go with the 2nd plan of ducting air from the crawlspace. I'll push it into the cold side and then the hot side will probably just have a grille or short duct leading to another part of the basement.
 
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/4

Notice the curtains do not touch the floor, or form a perfect air tight seal. Why is that? Because there is no need. You just need the cold side to stay relatively cold to the hot side. Your appliances have fans, let them move the air from the two isles, you don't need to induce airflow with air tight enclosures that force big pressure differences between hot and cold isles.

Just hang up some cheep industrial plastic "strip curtains" and be done with it. Hell, even a cheep plastic shower curtain from Walmart might work. No need to over engineer things.
 
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Never thought of a shower curtain, that may indeed work.

I'm all about over engineering... on the cheap. ;)
 
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