Cooling Home Lab issues

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badskater

Automation Architect
May 8, 2013
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Hey everyone,

I finally had time to build a room for my homelab on my new house, but I've hit quite a snag. I've had some heating issues due to too much hot air in the room, and been trying to find a solution that won't cost an arm and a leg. (Isn't it why we also buy used hardware too :D)

I've been wondering if moving blankets would be enough to separate the hot and cold air before using 2 AC Infinity CloudLine T4 to send the hot air in the uninsulated garage. (maybe even one would be enough for the whole lab)

There's a 14000 BTU AC unit already for the lab which has no issues cooling it as needed, but because of all the hot air, it's not able to follow currently.

Is there some people who did something like this here before, or what would you recommend to buy that would be better if that doesn't work?

Appreciate the help.
 

mmo

Well-Known Member
Sep 17, 2016
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have you tried Air Circulator Fan such as Vornado 630 in your server room? I don't have a server room, but circulating air might help your situation.
 

badskater

Automation Architect
May 8, 2013
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I have 2 of those, and it didn't help, the issue is the hot air that goes around. (I do have the plating to cover the holes on the racks, just behind the hot air move around a lot) Which is why I was wondering if moving blankets could make a good separation for the hot area of my lab and evacuate it thru the garage.
 

The Gecko

Active Member
Jan 4, 2015
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How about some pictures (wide angle) of your setup? Let us see what you are dealing with.
 

badskater

Automation Architect
May 8, 2013
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Canada
Gonna do that tomorrow. Had to go to the hospital today with the pregnant wife as well. (Luckily, the wife factor approved of the lab as long as it's in its separate room)

Edit: Arrived home a bit earlier than planned, so went to take the pictures. The wall on the right will have full sound treatment next week as well. (Missing a part of the UPS and a server in the rack on the left, as it's currently being repaired, using my old equipment until it's all done, since those servers require the 240v, compared to 120v)
 

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coxhaus

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Jul 7, 2020
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I was lucky back when I ran my server farm. I had widows so I could use a window AC. I installed 220v for AC and a dedicated 120v plug for servers.
 

acquacow

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Feb 15, 2017
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Have you gone through all of your BIOS power management settings and turned on the power saving features as well as c-states yet?


I have a few less servers than you, but I don't have any active cooling at all. Even with 4 hypervisors, 4 NAS, 3 switches, and 39TB online, I only use about 550W peak.
 

badskater

Automation Architect
May 8, 2013
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The AC is only a one-hose system.

All C-States are running, just there's 4 Servers with GPUs for AI and VDI testing. Also, there's 8 hosts on the right and 6 on the left as well. (Not including NASes and VMware Datastores)

NAS is 160 TB Usable and the 2 other Norco servers are my VMware Datastores with 72TB in each as well.

I'll make a full topic about my Lab/Home Servers once I'm done with building it.

The UPS repairs I did weren't enough, so went to see an electronic shop who deals with UPS, and they found most of the condensators are not good anymore. (Moving 5000km during winter in Canada killed many of them from what I was told) So to look with work to see pricings for UPS (5000-6000va ones as well)

My main issue is the Nexus switches and the GPU nodes for the heat. Rest is usually quite stable.
 

The Gecko

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Jan 4, 2015
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Badskater, are you familiar with the windows application mspaint? Would you please work up a floorplan of the garage, the racks, the AC unit, the door into the server room, the exhaust(s), and where you thought you'd hang the mover's blanket. Then paste/link that diagram here.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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With that much gear you really should setup cold\hot isle and vent the hot air out of the room, and have an AC unit that pulls in outside air then cools it so it's sucking in, cooling, blowing out hot.
 

badskater

Automation Architect
May 8, 2013
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@T_Minus that's why I'm asking if it's possible to use moving blankets to make the hot aisle system so I can get it out of the room thru a fan towards the garage who is not isolated, and is really cold due to Canadian temperatures.

@The Gecko Here's the floor plan. The exhaust are planned to be behind the racks. (Yes I had a floorplan of my house and just added the server room in there.)
 

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The Gecko

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I've looked over your floor plan and reread your earlier posts. I think you are doing a great job with the proposed design. Venting out into the garage is going to be a must.

For those visitors who are left scratching their heads after reading badskater's first post, an "Infinity CloudLine T4" is a ducted fan and marketed towards indoor grow tents and hydroponics. I use a similar fan to circulate the air in my 3D-printer cabinet through ULPA + carbon filters.

Here are the thoughts going through my head, and in no particular order:

1. Server Room Temperature
I don't have any recommendations on your AC setup, just observations.​
Why do data centers keep their server rooms cold? To reduce component failure due to heat. To increase time before a catastrophic failure due to high ambient temperature if the AC unit dies. But also note that server rooms tend to be large volumes of air. A large volume of air also extends the time before a failure due to high temps. Why is this important? Because those servers run someones business and absolutely must be online 24x365.​
It's been my experience that home lab servers don't need to be kept at 65 F. 75 F or even 80 F is fine, reducing your need for an AC unit. But it is still absolutely a necessity during the hot times of the year. When it is hot outside, an AC unit has to work even harder to dump the heat. This is when AC design efficiency is most important. What lowers your AC efficiency is that it is a single hose design. It vents the hot air coming off the condenser to the outside (good), but the air to cool the condenser is drawn from the server room itself. This adds to the load on the AC unit because the air in the server room is replaced with hot air from outside the server room, which would be the Rec room or outside the house through cracks in the walls/floor/ceiling. A two-hose AC unit is slightly more efficient at cooling a closed room because a two-hose AC unit doesn't turn the room it is cooling into a negative pressure zone.​
However, almost all of this one-hose/two-hose debate becomes a moot point because you are designing this server room to dump the hot-aisle air out to the garage, forcing you to constantly "import" fresh air into your server room.​
The amount of heat produced by the racks will dictate how fast your exhaust-to-garage fans run. If the fans run too slow, the air behind the blankets will seep out from behind the blankets back into the cool aisle, forcing the AC to work harder to keep the cool aisle cool. If it runs too fast, the exhaust-to-garage fans will pull air past the blankets without going through a server. This will draw warm air into the server room faster than it needs to be, which will force the AC unit to work harder than it needs to be. It looks like your ducted fan has a temperature probe that can be used to control the speed of the fan. You will need to have that probe inside the hot-aisle.​
If I were you, I would plan to increase the number of exhaust fans to cover emergency situations. Similar to how servers are over-built. They have an abundance of fan capacity and ramp up fan speeds when a single fan dies, giving you time to perform a repair. Also, consider what it would take to put those exhaust fans on the UPS.​
Also note that if your main source of air into the server room is your Rec room, then you need to begin thinking about your home's permanent AC unit as part of the server room equation.​
2. Air Filtration
If your server room was a closed/sealed room, then you could get away with an air filter that is fairly small. Once the air filter cleans the particles out of a closed room, then there isn't a reason to leave the air filter running full blast. But your server room is designed to have a constant flow of air through it. You are going to need a ducted HEPA air filter and keep the server room door closed, or your servers will be full of dust, hair, and that weird black crud that accumulates on fan blades.​
The air filter, like the exhaust fans, should also be kept on a UPS.​
3. Size. aka "Atsa lotta BTUs"
Your list of equipment is rather lengthy, and in my humble opinion, oversized for the room it inhabits. In fact, the list of equipment is so lengthy, I am curious if you priced renting space at a nearby co-lo and experienced sticker-shock.​
If the power goes out and the exhaust fans are not on UPS, then the tiny server room overheats quickly, causing a failure. If the power goes out and the ducted air filter intake isn't on UPS, then the tiny server room is starved for clean air and overheats quickly, causing a failure. If the power goes out during the summer and the AC isn't on UPS, same quick overheating failure.​
But perhaps this isn't a big issue. Perhaps all your servers are set to auto shutdown if the power goes out, meaning all you need are 5 minutes of UPS runtime. If you need more runtime, then you are now looking at auto-starting external generators and/or Tesla Powerwalls.​


All too often I see forum threads (some here, most on different boards) where someone asks a question or seeks advice to improve their design and the respondents don't answer the question. Instead the respondents seek to change the whole plan, causing the asker to wander away in frustration. I tried very hard not to do that to you. To be honest, I had a good time working through some of these challenges.
 

badskater

Automation Architect
May 8, 2013
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@The Gecko As you said, I need Air Filtration, that is taken care of as well. The list is big, but it's all planned for auto shutdown. It's mostly a home lab, what is "prod" levels is the NAS and Plex who can be shutdown as needed and the 2 routers at the top of the NAS. Rest is shutdown 90% of the time, just when I need to run the lab stuff, I prefered to make sure everything was fine.

I keep my server room at 78f for the same reason you talked. The AC is only running as AC between June and September, rest of the year it runs as a fan, due to the temperatures in my area making it quite easy to keep it cool like this. My area on average is between 40-70f outside those 4 months. I fully agree with the home permanent AC which is also used to get air into the room as well during summer season. (Winter is closed due to heat for the rest of the house)

Everything is planned for mainly keep the air cool. I wanted to be sure and why I asked the question first, if I should use the Moving Blankets to separate Hot/Cold Aisles, which I see it's fine from that point of view.

The hot air is mainly from my lab equipment that runs about 10-20 hours a week, just I wanted to be safe in my design.

That is also the main reason, I prefered to build than to Colo. It's just a RHCA/VCDX lab for when I study on it.
 

mmo

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Sep 17, 2016
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i just saw a video regarding rackmount air conditioner, not sure if it helps you.

 

Sean Ho

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Just be careful about piercing the thermal envelope (boundary between conditioned and unconditioned space). The garage in particular needs, according to code, to be isolated from living space due to hazardous gas. Even if venting out the side wall instead of into the attached garage, negative pressure as noted above brings unconditioned air in through cracks/gaps in the envelope, putting more load on your house HVAC.

One strategy is to tie the server room more tightly to the house HVAC: vent server exhaust to an air return (potentially with inline fan), and ensure the servers can intake fresh air from the rest of the house (sometimes just a filtered mesh on the door is enough, depends on how well-controlled temps are on the other side of the door). In the heating season (particularly in Canada), this helps your servers ease the burden on your HVAC, providing pre-heated air to it.

If that's not enough, a logical next step up is a mini-split (two pipes, as mentioned above; what's circulating isn't air but coolant).
 
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