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Considerations for Raised Floor Installation?
shanm asks: "I'm wondering if the community would have any recommendations and or cost rules of thumb on a raised floor installation. I'm considering doing that in a basement room (soon to be PC room and office) to make network/power wiring easier, modifiable, and expandable. The biggest constraint is that the basement doesn't have a 9 or 10 foot ceiling. So I don't have an unlimited height on the floor."
What is the ceiling height? Telling us that it is not 9-10 feet doesn't really help a whole lot. Is it 8.5 feet or is it more like 6.5 feet?
Wires are not thick. If you REALLY need raised flooring, you can get by with 2x4s.
That said, you could easily run conduit along the top of the walls and just drop down wherever you need to. It'll save you from losing ceiling height. It'll also be easier to access when you want to extend things. Of course this only works as long as everything is going to be next to a wall and doesn't account for a receptionist desk in the middle of your basement.
I work for IBM, and as such I work with raised floor environments on a daily basis. In fact, I'm sitting in one right now.
They're not worth it.
First, you can't easily clean under there. Dust will accumulate in quantities you can't begin to imagine, followed by dust mites, mold, and other assorted evil.
Second, raised floors don't make cable management any easier, they just hide the mess. Sure, the server room looks spotless and clean, but under that floor is a nightmarish rat's nest of cables. Wait until you have to move a cable from one location to another, pulling up floor tiles one at a time to untangle the various knots that have formed...
Third, you can't mop the floor anymore. This floor I'm sitting over hasn't been mopped in several decades. These tiles used to be white!
Fourth, the secondary function of a raised floor is to distribute cooling. Typically, you'll have a giant air conditioner that pumps cold air under the floor. You then have special tiles with holes in them under your racks, through which your servers draw in fresh cold air. If you're not going to set something like that up, you're losing one of the primary benefits of a raised floor.
I could go on and on.
Instead of making a raised floor, make a drop ceiling and run the cables in racks through there: simpler, easier, faster, and cheaper. If you're worried about the height of the ceiling, don't bother with the tiles and just run metal racks.
Trust me, you don't want a raised floor in your basement.
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Unless you are in a fairly unusual location, your basement WILL get some water
in it occasionally -- not every year, maybe, but often enough that you need to
take it into consideration. The flooding may not achieve any significant
depth, but even a house on top of a hill can get an inch of water in the
basement on occasion when it rains very hard and fast.
Another thing about basements is that they often have exposed rafters, which
makes overhead wiring significantly more convenient than it would be in a
main floor scenerio. Drill a few one-inch holes at intervals along each
rafter, put in a few cross-bars, and overhead wiring is easy to run, easy
to change, easy to manage. If you have exposed rafters, I would suggest
considering maybe taking advantage of that, instead of doing raised flooring
in a basement scenerio.
An upper floor scenerio would of course be a different thing entirely.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I used to keep my PCs on top of milk crates and the surge protector, hub, etc. on top of the PCs. I did my best to contain the whole mess of wires with zip ties or velcro straps.
With the space under the crates and some space on the sides and behind, I got pretty good air flow. One of my machines was overclocked so it needed it. The whole setup worked pretty well and wasn't too unsightly.