Emergency Cooling with Limited Power? 132
Nos. asks: "I work for a small webhosting company (I'm on leave from my Gov't job) and we've started having some power problems. Actually someone managed to blow out the substation powering the area so we're piggy backing off another one, and they're slowly powering more and more things off. Elevators, lights, etc. are gone. Since the building we work in has a few IT company's working it in, they're trying as hard as they can to keep the A/C running, but its not looking good. As such, the possibility exists that our server room could get very warm, very quickly. Since we've already powered off everything that's not essential, we're starting to look at ways to keep the room cool without using a lot of power. Generators an small A/C units are a last resort as it would mean holes in the walls. The only thing we've been able to come up with is dry ice and some small fans to circulate the air. Of course this is happening as we're heading in to a week of over 30C days. Does Slashdot have any ideas?"
Rent big truck generator & run whole building (Score:5, Interesting)
AC onna truck (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, there are often companies who can provide air conditioning and/or generators on a truck. They'll block off a doorway or the loading dock and pump the air in through there. If you have a little more time (and appropriate permits, etc.), they're often willing to run temporary connections into your forced air system.
Whenever they do HVAC work on our building, they have the trucks set up and waiting. We have a few too many computers to even survive with "just the essentials" if the AC goes out.
Nix the Dry ice (Score:5, Interesting)
most important of all -- (Score:4, Interesting)
But seriously -- be sure to consider the relative risks of keeping your server room up versus taking it down and waiting. If you take it down now, you're guaranteeing yourself downtime, but you can come back online as soon as the substation comes back.
If you try to stay running, you're not guaranteed to have downtime, but if you do it'll be intense, because you'll have damaged hardware to deal with.
How much does water and sewage cost? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bring a hose into the room, and use a car radiator or cheap, large coil of copper tubing, and run the water through that and into a drain. Blow air through and you've got a fairly inexpensive way to cool.
Water is not expensive, but you could go through hundreds of gallons a day. Limit your water usage by watching the temperature of the incoming and outgoing water, and placing a valve in the outlet. If the temperature difference is great (60 in, 80 out) then let the water through a bit faster.
You could even set up several of these in series so you can cool different portions of the room. Think about how the air circulates - if you can get the air to go clockwise around the room the fans will use less energy, and the whole room should reach the same temperature.
Of course, it goes without saying that you need to be careful not only of leaks but condensation. Place buckets under the coils, and connections/transitions - make sure you have no leaks, and dump the buckets occasionally.
If the cooling isn't great enough, put a set of coils just after the inlet into a trashcan of water and dry ice.
Note that it may take several minutes of water running before you actually get the cooler water, depending on how much of the building it has to travel through to get to you. If it goes through a lot of the building, you may not have very cool water at all, as it'll attain the temperature of the building. Give it a good half hour or hour at full blast and measure it to see what is possible.
-Adam
Re:lots of air flow (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, with a fan and some cheap ducting you can have a similar effect. You'd need a much more powerful fan to do it though.
A serious suggestion? Generators and portable AC units. I've seen them used by a former company when the AC was inadequate in the server room. They were about 1.3m tall and had large white hoses coming out of the top to make them about 2m tall overall. You had to feed them water on a pretty regular basis since they were not closed loop AC units, and you'd also need generators to give them power. It worked in a pinch though. No need to cut holes in the ceiling either -- they just vented into the room (suck air in from the bottom, output at the top).
Re:Illegal (Score:2, Interesting)