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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?"
I read someone had done this for his desktop pc..
Take a long flat piece of aluminium bar. Bolt one end into the inside of the AP possibly on top of the hottest chips (will need to drill a hole or slot in the side) and the other end of the bar is bolted on a water pipeline or metal structure of the building that runs through the concrete. This makes your router VERY immobile.
I'm betting youll find an easier way like placing the router in a cooler place, but I just needed to throw in this possibility.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Anybody have any solutions aside from a alum-alloy-peltier-inter-cooled-turbo-charged-9 monstrosity?
Buy a linksys. They have an operating temperature of -10C to 55C (14F to 131F).
I'll second that.
I used to use a nice SMC-branded rackmount 10/100 "switching hub." Fan-cooled, 12 ports, looked and felt solid. Recently, it met its fate: it's internal power supply caught fire (!).
So, I needed a replacement. And I'm broke. So I found a cheap (less than $30) 8-port 10/100 switch, branded Hawking Technology and made by who-knows-who. It works as well as any other cheap switch, which is to say: just fine for me here at home.
It ran quite hot while sitting horizontally on a shelf. My newly-discovered fear for warm networking gear told me to fix that.
So, I hung it vertically from the side of the same shelf, using the wall-mount holes on the back and some cable ties. The 8 RJ45 jacks on the bottom allow plenty of air to go past/through them, which escapes out of the small vent near the top of the unit.
It's not quite cool to the touch, but the surface of it is now within "just-barely-warm" range. Which I consider quite good enough.
Passive convection cooling and is underappreciated in the electronics design world by apparently everyone but audio companies and Apple Computer. It wouldn't be hard, at all, to make this thing cool itself acceptably in the horizontal position, but nobody took the time.
Kid-proof tablet..