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Computer Room Hot?
Anonymous Coward writes "Here is a cool PC ventilation product I ran across. Like many faithful on here, I have multiple computers in a small room which really heat up the place. My office is a good eight degrees warmer than the rest of the house This product called R.A.C.H.A.L (Reduce Annoying Computer Heat And Loudness) vents computer exhaust into the wall, not the room. Might cut down on the electricity bills during those hot months.." Another approach: An anonymous reader writes "If your 'puter is getting to loud, you might want to consider some silent cooling. And the gang at OverclockersClub has just that. A three page review of the Zalman VGA Heatpipe Cooler. This thing is pretty nice looking, and with no power, no noise, what else could a guy ask for? Check out the review here. How come more companies don't do the "silent" thing?" Borked link fixed.
My house is freezing, and I wouldn't be able to survive in my computer room (Basement, AKA utility room) without the heat. Good for corperations, not for me. Anyone else use spare clock cycles for warmth?
So take off all your clothes!
Chicks love nekkid geeks in hot computer rooms.
How come more companies don't do the "silent" thing?
The problem is, silence is golden. So therefore, in this poor economy, companies can't pay for the gold required and consumers can't really afford it.
I would love manufacturers to start taking this issue more seriously. Choice of fans is important, but also the hard drives as well. Apple fans can look smug here I think - Apple do take this stuff seriously. The PC world? Not so much, and it's a real shame.
Cheers,
Ian
If you don't have to yell to hear over it, how do you know it's working? ...or is it just me and my Sparc?
An anonymous reader writes "If your 'puter is getting to loud, you might...
BZZZT! Sorry Sparky. You lose any geek points by using the term "'puter".
Trolling is a art,
90% of my excessive volume and heat generation comes from various rack-mount appliances (like Cisco switches), not pee-cees. It doesn't look like these things are very friendly towards that type of environment.
The basic concept might still be sound, though. Turn your rack into an enclosure, add some intake fans, and vent the entire rack's exhaust somewhere else. (I wonder what the exhaust temperature for an entire rack would reach?)
Just do the right thing to begin with. If you want silence and no heat use a Cyrix C3. I'm sure you'll say it's too slow for you. Hey, you know what the saying is:
Silent/Cold/Low-Power. Fast.
Pick 1.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The cavity at any given point in your wall, if it's to code, is about two cubic feet, surrounded by wood and plaster. Unless you had a magically powerful fan in your PC you won't be getting any circulation at all, because you're pressurizing a fixed cavity. Furthermore, the tube isn't insulated. This is a really silly idea. However, if you vented it *outside*, then you're talking something useful.
--Mike
then there's the 3rd option. the waste energy manifests itself as mana and enables me to cast lightning bolts to smite the puny dwaves AAAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
dammit. I really need to lay off the RPGs.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
It seems to me that venting the heat into your walls could cause condensation or other moisture problems inside of your walls. It also seems like you could get some very strange noises resulting from the forced air going into an enclosed space. The backpressure from exhausting into the wall could also shorten your fan life or possibly worse. If you have fire blocking in your walls, you could be blowing hot air into a space as little as 16" x 24" or so, and once that heats up you'll be getting the heat back into your room as it radiates through the drywall.
You also couldn't effectively use this on an exterior wall because insulation should be taking up all of the available air space inside the wall cavity anyway. Also, not all of the heat your computer generates is going to be exhausted by the fan, so this may not result in a huge reduction anyway, and it becomes even more problematic if you have more than one exhaust fan. Just a few thoughts I had.
Hook the tube up to a water faucet, and connect it to your computer's intake fan (rather than exhaust), you can lower the temperature of your computer with an efficient, cooling mist!
$8.95/mo web hosting
In the new Emery building in downtown Portland, Or. there is no furnace. The entire building is heated with the waste heat from the computers and server rooms.
It works well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As a carpenter/electrician/plumber in my spare time, I think sending computer exhaust to a residential wall is one of the dumbest ideas I've heard of. Venting to another room, crawl space, basement, outside, etc. is OK, but a proper wall cavity with normal studs only has a few square feet of volume. For an outside wall, breaking through a vapor barrier and sending the exhaust to fiberglass insulation is very, very bad.
The only valid application I can think of is for some commercial office space, where usually cheap extruded steel studs hold up sheetrock and the wall tops are open to the space above a drop ceiling. Also, the steel studs have holes in them to allow for cables and some horizontal air movement.
The website does not have any of this information concerning checking the validity of walls. Ugh.
I have 6 pc's running daily with half running 24 hours a day. My whole bill is $60-$70/month for everything (fridge, lights, 32" TV, DVD, etc.). This includes an Athlon and a P4. No SMP at the moment though. :-(
What are you running there to generate that much of an electric bill?
Does anyone else find it horribly bad journalism/science to report with a graph where one bar is a third as long as another bar, yet the large value is less than 1% larger than the other because they start the graph at a random number instead of zero, and then just using a graph break in the scale?
If you make a bar graph and the values are 1% different, the sizes of the bars should be 1% different. Why do they not understand this?
one two three four
I've seen this at other websites, too. Does it irk anyone else?
Since the ventilation system restricts airflow somewhat, we noticed some systems had increased chassis temperatures due to poor design.
In other words, your computer will run hotter. While they blame it on "poor design", anything that restricts air flow out of the box (and trying to blow the air thru 4 ' of pipe, then into a wall, will restrict your power supply's air flow) will shorten your box's life. It will also void any warranty (counts as abuse).
This idea is "so" lame that I can't help but think we've all been trolled.
>What are you running there to generate that much of an electric bill?
He probably lives in the US. I got flamed last time for discussing the old "is it cheaper to leave the lights on?" idea because it was so hard to believe that I only pay $0.0275 US / kwh... IIRC, a "normal" computer only costs about $2.50 USD per month to run in Canada.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Or you can open a window :-)
If the excess heat is all from your monitors, then invest in a KVM switch, so you only have one Keyboard, Video (Monitor) and Mouse. While KVM's were once very expensive and seldom seen out side of computer rooms or NOC's, the prices have dropped. Also you can take the money saved on multiple monitors and invest in that nice flat screen you've been drooling over, but could not cost justify! Currently I have one very good 19" monitor, rather then 4 cheaper ones and much more "room" in the room!
Agreed. This hardly smacks of professionalism. Check out these gems from the FAQ page:
They of course don't talk about 50 places where air flows OUT of your walls. Plus, they fail to address the questionable legality (re: building codes) of this "product". Right.... 'Cause there are no bugs that _walk_ instead of fly, and they certainly couldn't crawl up the tube. Oh, and of course, you'll never turn your computer off ever, so there'll never be a time when the fan might be _off_. And what self respecting company would put "muuuhaaahaaa" in a FAQ.There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
So instead of "Here is a cool PC ventilation product I ran across", he should really be saying "Here is a cool PC ventilation product that my company makes."
Sure, it's kinda neat. But I hope
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
this is woefully unimpressive, and uninspired.
...if i ever find a fridge and hook this up, i'll be sure to post pictures :)
first off, with 16" on center stud walls, constructed of 2x4s, and an average studheight of 92 and 5/8ths inches, you can see that the volume inside a stud wall "cell" is pretty piss poor - roughly 5800 cubic inches.
There are a few issues that make this "solution" stupid.
1) the heat doesn't go anywhere. there should be a correspondingly large diameter cut out in the top plate of the wall, so that the air can escape in the attic (where it might do some good, as the attic is cold and properly ventilated, unlike the interior of a wall)
2) there may be cold water supply pipes in wall. do you want to heat your cold water ? especially if they're copper pipes with a very effective heat transfer characteristic
2a) there may be runs of NM-B (romex) electrical cable in that wall cell. The ampacity of electrical wire is a function of its rated capacity, and while most ampacity ratings are given up to 70C, if this thing were _seriously_ efficient at cooling a computer, then it would perhaps begin to cause problems with in-wall structures
3) how does the national fire code feel about stuffing heat into closed interior walls (made of flame-retardant drywall, typically)
4) if the excess heat it dispells isn't enough to cause any code violations, then it clearly isn't sucking enough heat to be worth installing
5) this does little to eliminate the overall heat+noise of _systems_
My idea for this was to find an abandoned refrigerator, or better yet, freezer, and just putting whole systems inside there, and then running flue-spec double-walled exhaust vent pipe elsewhere. Having all the PCs stuck inside a fridge/freezer (shut off, of course) that was properly vented should make things cool _AND_ quiet. Don't beleive me ? Try putting your battery powered alarm clock in your freezer, and see if you can still hear it once the door shuts. You want whole-system noise cancellation ? Then you need real insulation. Want to keep your office cool? then you'll need to do a lot more than putting a turbluent undersized vacuum hose on the back of your PC.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
This has so many obvious problems, it isn't funny...
First off, I've worked in PC repair for years. So many machines power supply fan is so weak, it can barely make a breeze behind the machine. The restriction of that pipe would pretty much kill off the flow. Make a straight smooth walled pipe would do better, but not that flex hose.
Next, the 4"x16"x8' space is going to be very small, and heat up quickly.. My office is roughtly 8'x12'x8'. You're dumping out the heat into roughly 3 cubic feet of space, with minimal ventalation. My 768 cubic foot, with a 24 square foot hole in it (doorway), with 4 PC's and 2 monitors running gets rather warm rather quickly, even with forced cooling (A/C ducts).
So, besides ruining the insulation in the wall, if it's an outside wall (interior walls are usually uninsulated), he's going to build up lots of heat and moisture (the heat won't be enough to really dry out the air).
I don't think the heating of the wall will be much of a factor, since the PC will overheat rather quickly and die.. I'd give it a few months, before the user wonders why it crashes several times daily, and then finally won't boot.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Here's a thought I had, but probably will never get around to building.
Lots of people go to the expense and effort of building/buying radiators or using large tanks of water as the heatsink for their water-based CPU cooler systems.
Last year, I started measuring the temperature of the water in my toilet tank. After a flush, it drops to 5-6 degrees Celsius. Between flushes, it gradually reaches room temperature, of course, but this is still no worse than a radiator or bucket. In practice, however, it never actually gets above about 10C (while room temperature is about 20C).
In other words, it's a supply of cold water which you were going to simply flush away.
Place a small bucket inside the toilet tank. Put a submersible pump in there, run the water to the CPU coolers, bring the water back and drain it over the bucket in the tank.
Everytime you flush the 6 beers you went through while flaming me for my Linux isn't ready for the desktop article, you can rest assured that the water which cools your CPU is being replaced with fresh, cold water. No mold, no mildew.
The purpose of putting the pump in the bucket is so that there's always a supply of water for the pump, even during the flush. And the purpose of draining the return line over the bucket is so that if your toilet tank doesn't refill for some reason, you'll still keep your bucket full of water and buy some time for hardware monitors to shut the system down if it's getting too warm.
I don't know how hot the water in the toilet will get, but think about this:
Of course, the only thing I'd worry about is the quality of the submersible pump. After all, if water leaked into the pump, then the water in the toilet could come into contact with one side of the AC line... the other side of which is grounded to your fusebox. If you happened to touch another grounded object while urinating (concrete floor, sink faucet, etc), then enough current could find that your stream of urine and urethral tissues are a more attractive ground path than the plastic sewer pipe. I think I'd invest in an isolation transformer (search ebay) to reduce the risk of highly ...unpleasant... damage.
Ahh... the joys of being an eccentric genius.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
One of these days I'll borrow someones digital camera and throw up a website, but for now a description will have to do you:
For the fans, I picked up a pair of Panaflo 120MM Ultra Quiets (PanaFlo L1A P/N:FBA12G12L1A). These are great fans for a low noise setup because they move a LOT of air with practically zero noise. I mounted these inside the front of my case (below the fdd) by cutting two large holes in the cases sheetmetal (many cases already have one fan mount here). Next, I picked up a 3*3 sheet of very thin sheet metal from a local HVAC supply store, and sat down with a pencil and paper to design the CPU vent. Basically, I designed a four sided, open-ended metal box that passed from the front of my case to the back. At the front, it's mounted to the fan and is the same width as the fan (this allows it to mount to the fan boltholes, and prevents air leakage. From there it tapered down to the width of my CPU heatsink at the CPU mount, and continued on to the back of the case at that width (picture an odd looking square funnel in your mind, with a few kinks to get everything to line up). Once I had my sketch, I glued it onto the metal, cut the sheet in the appropriate places, and bent it to create the finished box (take your time and do this right, sheetmetal is unforgiving if you bend it wrong, and it can be VERY sharp). I then cut a square hole midway down the vent for my CPU heat sink, and closed the seam with a few sheetmetal screws. This basically gives me a square tube running from the front of my case and out the back. The fan pushes cool air into the front, and because the heatsink sticks into the vent and the air is forced through it, the hot air passes out the back. The system works very well, and my CPU temps (P4 1.6@2333Mhz), never crack 55C under full load.
Here's THE most imporant step to the project: After test-fitting the duct, I picked up a can of rubberized tool dip-insulator (PlastiDip) from the local hardware store (dayglow yellow). Mechanics and electricians buy this stuff to dip their metal handled tools in in order to protect against electrical shock or heat transfer, but I used it to keep the metal duct from shorting anything, and to provide a little extra sound dampening (keeps the vent sides from vibrating with the airflow). I'd suggest buying enough to dip the whole thing, but if you're short on cash you can just pour it over the outside (I've heard that there are spray-can versions, but I couldn't find them). After it has hardened, take a brush to the inside and make sure your seams and any protruding edges are also coated to smooth out any spots that might impede airflow (and generate noisy vibrations.)
The second fan sits in a much simpler five sided sheetmetal box. This box just has vent flaps cut into it that direct the air to specific parts of the case. For spots further away from the fan, small tubes were fabricated from the sheet metal and pop-riveted on above the vents in order to "aim" the air at a specific spot. This targeted cooling means that the overall case temperature is a little higher, but that the items I'm really worried about (RAM, video chipset, mobo chipset) get all the air they need. After the fabrication was done and the second box was tested, it was treated to the same dip-insulation as the first vent.
Couple this with an Enermax Whisper power supply, and you've got a silent computer that runs pretty cool. The whole project, BTW, it took me about a week to finish, and about $50 worth of materials. If you don't have sheet metal shears and a smooth faced hammer (for folding the metal) it might cost you a little more.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Welcome to California... The power went out twice last night alone, and that's while I'm paying $150 in electric bills (for two people).
I'm on a mad dash to crop the power-usage in my home, and the first casualty was my Athlon desktop and 19" CRT, in favor of a notebook.
Next, I'm thinking of replacing my lights with candles, and putting the frame of my TV around my window. I'll just tell everyone it's permanently tuned to the "Bird Watching" channel.
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