I have my office and rack in the basement where I work out of during the week. In the early spring and late fall when there isn’t much cooling it would get rather warm to be comfortable (80F-82F).
A few weeks ago I realized that I have a cold air return duct in the ceiling so I cut an 8"x10" hole in it and left the furnace fan on 24/7 hoping that would help…it didn’t really.
Last week I decided to hang an ~8" fan 3" below the hole I cut into the cold air return to see what would happen if I forced air into the duct…it didn’t do much.
Last Thursday I remembered something from my volunteer firefighter days about how to set up a fan to ventilate a room through a window/door and how it was important to have the wind cover the entire opening. This led me to put a 12" fan in place of the 8" fan at 9PM.
Fast forward about an hour and my office was now 76F. The next morning it was 72F and it has stayed at 72F-73F ever since then.
The side benefit is that I’m able to provide a bunch of supplemental heat to the upstairs meaning that rather than my heat pump running 16hr+ per day with the electric strips kicking on periodically overnight during the <15F weather we’ve been having the heat pump has been running for 8hrs per day and the electric backup strips haven’t needed to kick on at all.
I’m curious how it works for cooling next summer when I won’t be able to run the furnace fan 24/7 since that’d just dump humidity back into the house so we’ll see how that goes.
I’m still pretty happy with the results at the moment.
My equipment lives in my family room. I’m in SC and run three fully populated Dell r720XD’s 24/7. It keeps the house warm in winter, but heats it up more during the summer (it sucks!). I haven’t found a solution to exhausting the heat without creating a negative pressure in the house causing outside heat to be pulled in, unfortunately.
Enclose it, route outside air in and back out?
Humidity in the South hits 100% way too often, unfortunately. I’d imagine that would not be great for them.
Most servers are designed to take humidity really well, or at least that is what I tell myself when I think about my garage rack lol.
yeah ive had mine cooled with a swamp cooler for 3 summers now and they havent died yet, haha. they are old used servers tho, and i have many more.
Fair enough. I dunno if you’re actually trying to solve the problem or not, but a mini split or a proper dual hose portable air conditioner are probably your best bets, neither of them generate positive or negative pressure in the conditioned space. All depends on how much energy costs are a factor to you.