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Cooling your Access Point?
CmdrChillupa asks: "Summer's here in the US. I don't really mind the heat and I've lived my whole life without AC. Just gotten used to having fresh air instead of pre-processed. There's only one problem with this whole theory. After a long day at work I get home and go to do a little surfing on my PowerBook and my WLAN is down. I have a Siemens Speedstream 2624 Wireless Router that from all appearances dislikes the heat more than I do. I've gotten into a habit of holding it in front of a fan for a few minutes everyday when I get home, I thought the fridge might be a bit too humid for it's electronics. Anybody have any solutions aside from a alum-alloy-peltier-inter-cooled-turbo-charged-9 monstrosity?"
Put the box in spot that gets no sunlight on the floor. this is in contrast to placing it near the ceiling where heat can gather.
consider a small fan to blow air over the box to get some ventilation.
also consider placing the box in your basement. for example: I live in a 3 story 100+ year old row home, no a/c. The floors lower to the ground are consistently cooler then upper floors. so keep this ap on a lower floor, maybe even the basement.
As the parent post suggests, circulation may be the biggest requirement.
You don't necessarily need cold air from A/C, you just need to keep the air moving.
As an extreme example, I saw a monitor overheat and destroy itself once because someone left a few magazines on top of it and covered the vents. It was not a particularly warm day, there was just no circulation.
Unfortunately, linksys boxes do get hotter than 131F.
Is that what they're talking about? I figured they meant 131F room temperature...
Anyway, I run my Linksys 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in my unairconditioned apartment (I have AC in the bedroom, but the Linksys is in the kitchen). It was 95 degrees yesterday. No problems whatsoever.
Perhaps Linksys isn't the best choice, but I'm sure an access point can be found which can handle the summer heat.
A typical refrigerator has high humidity. If they kept humidity down, your food would dry out.
- Mount it or set it on small blocks so air can flow freely around the entire unit.
- Mount it to the wall.
- Use a vacuum and clean any dust and debris out.
- Remove some of the plastic casing over the warmest chip, and mount a tiny fan (such as those sold at radio shack) onto the case, blowing onto the chip
- Hang it from a string from the cieling or bookshelf
- Place it on a large aluminum (aluminium, for you other blokes) plate, or block of steel
- Attach it to the blade of your ceiling fan
- Go to Radio Shack and get a few aluminum heatsinks and use thermal adhesive to glue them to the tops of the chips (or pcmcia card) that are getting hot
- RTFM
- Put it in your neighbor's airconditioned house/apt/condo/cardboard box
- Learn not to buy cheap
- Use it in an interactive, wireless art exhibit - "Schrodinger's Net connection: You don't know if it's dead or alive until you open the laptop..."
-Adamlike this "bloke"
http://www.asciimation.co.nz/beer
Not sure whether this will make you feel any better, but I have a Netgear ME-102 access point and it's never had any heat problems.
I live in Washington DC where the summers get pretty summery. I keep it hanging in an unobscured east-facing window where it gets several hours of direct sunlight per day. It's between the window and the blinds so it also gets the heat reflected back by the blinds. I don't use the A/C in my apartment (prefer the fan), so it's usually about 80 in the shade indoors. The thing's gone through one full summer and what we've had of this one, without a hiccup.
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