Micks Distractions

I have a lot of hard­ware run­ning 24x7 — PCs, routers, switches, fire­walls, SAN, and it’s all con­tained within a cup­board where I stick it all. It’s pretty cool, in that it’s a dust free envi­ron­ment, and keeps the noise at bay, which is my intent. It’s basi­cally a small con­tained com­puter room. What’s not cool about it, is that it isn’t.

You see it lacks the ther­mal con­trol. I’ve been muck­ing around for a while try­ing to get the ther­mal issues under con­trol on the cheap. That is; mak­ing use of old power sup­ply fans to keep the air cir­cu­lat­ing, pulling in cool air, and push­ing out warm air. In win­ter it’s really not a prob­lem. I used to have the door ajar, (and get­ting dust in at
the same time), and a fan pulling air into the house, which actu­ally warmed up the house a bit. Even in win­ter, with the door closed and all fans turned off, the cup­board gets to 35C in around 30 min­utes. Sum­mer is much worse. With tem­per­a­tures soar­ing to 40C, any device will cark it quickly. I’ve had sev­eral hard disks die this way.

It’s win­ter here at the moment, so decided to do some­thing about it. Win­ter is the easy part. Just suck in cold air from the out­side. We’re see­ing between 5C to 10C at night so suck­ing that air in will cool that cup­board down well. I trot­ted off to Bun­nings and bought an inline fan unit that’s designed to pull air from one room and dis­trib­ute it to
another. It was a bit steep, IMO, at $80, but is just the ticket.

I had to, though, run a large diam­e­ter pipe, or tub­ing from the side of the house which is 6m away. I could have cut into the roof sheet­ing, but didn’t like com­pro­mis­ing the roof, and I wanted to pull in the air from the south side of the house. We for­tu­nately had some left over 100mm PVC drain pipe, so I cut a hole in the side of the house, shoved a 6m length of pipe in, and con­nected it up with 100mm elbows, to inside the cup­board. I put a fil­ter on the inlet on the side of the house, (hope­fully it won’t block up quickly).

The fan is a 150mm fan, so I had to buy a 100mm to 150mm PVC expander. On the end of that I gaffed some springy tub­ing to the inline fan, and attached some more tub­ing off the other side. There’s enough there to direct the cold air directly at the air inlets of all the equipment.

I had to dan­gle the fan from some coat hang­ers from the ceil­ing to avoid noise from vibra­tion. I quickly dis­cov­ered that a 40W fan can gen­er­ate some loud vibra­tions. Note the use of coat hang­ers which are the sec­ond best hack­ing tools, (which I’m sure Mac­Gyver used more than once).

The results were pretty amaz­ing. Below are some RRD graphs of one of my servers, with 4 1Terabyte disks in it. Already you can see a 10C drop:

Next thing to sort out is the sum­mer cooling.

The handy thing with this inline fan is that it has a trap door to stop back drafts. What I might do is, (sort of), the reverse in sum­mer. That is: suck air from the inside of the house, through the cup­board, and into the roof cav­ity. The cooler air being forced into that space will dis­perse the hot­ter air already there, and will con­se­quently make the house cooler. So, I’ll prob­a­bly need another one of these inline fan units, or else make a valve attachment.

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