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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."
It's ok to just say that your dad won't let you put holes in the walls. We'll understand.
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?
basement bad! water, flooding, other things in basement! You definitely don't want to do it in your basement, especially in a normal house.
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She might get upset if you go around raising floors in her basement without her permission.
Ask your local municipal code inspector. You typically need 7 foot + (usually more) clearance from floor to ceiling or else your room won't pass code. Raised floors need to be done professionaly. I wouldn't recommend any other way - everything from electrical outlets to height, fire and safety codes will have to be inspected.. you wouldn't want to tear it out when you sell/move so get inspection on your plans before you start or hire a pro
Byron Miller for Congress.
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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What about installing a hanging ceiling and running the wires overhead? ... You could run the wires inside PVC tubing (or whatever you prefer) that's strapped to the beams of your basement ceiling, then hang the ceiling tiles afterwards, at your leisure.
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Since that's not likely practical for you, consider the other option that large data centers use: overhead raceways. Run your power and data cables overhead, then down into your racks/shelves.
This will save you the (possibly substantial) cost and hassle of raised flooring that you likely can't put to good use anyway. The cabling is actually more accessible, still out of harms way, and if neatly done it can be nice to look at.
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.
...has ever flooded, or even smells damp, Don't do it!!! Use overhead cable trays or even run the wires up between floor joists. You don't want to ever mix wires and water, even if they're low voltage. It makes an unholy mess. I wouldn't have anything within 3 feet of the floor, if possible. Mount your rack servers on the walls, not sitting on the floor. Ditto for monitors, etc and especially UPS's! Speaking of UPS's, give your sump pump priority over keeping your servers running.
Good luck - my installation barely survived the floods caused by Hurricane Gaston (the stupid slideshow says Frances, but it was Gaston.)
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
They were invented not because of any type of ceiling height excess, but because the distance from the walls were too far to channel and cable around lots of annoying things.
You basement, forget the ceiling height, that is oh so redundant.
Are you going to have more than 10 PC towers plugged in at seatable desks? (and that is still a low return on investment).
If you room isn't being planned to fit 5/6 desks and some central desks that do not have easy wall access, then I think the idea of a floor installation is laughable.
Once again: unless you *need*, and by need I mean you understand the reasoning behind raised floor 'stalls, them for a purpose, why bother?
Also there is a new technology just around the corner, I mean, like maybe in 20-50 years, called WiFi, I think that is what it is called, i am sure I was googling for something unrelated and an engadget page with info on it popped up (WHATEVER I search for on google I end up with an FUCKING engadget page showing in the results, weblogs inc shoudl be sued for aggressively poisoning google. fucktards).
Shit, I lost track of parenthesis, this started out as an insightful post, I don't know where it ended up.
fucking weblogs inc.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Sounds like the poster has the case of server room envy, so bad to the point he is willing to build the experience right into his own home. Sadly this is probably because he cannot find a job where he is access to a raised floor area, and he is jealous. No telling why he is acting this way, but we could guess it because his own incompetence in finding these kind of jobs, or a lack of them in his local. Whatever the case maybe, had he actually worked in a place that has raised floors, especially for any prolonged amount of time, would cause you to associate them to *AHEM* work, and not the sort of thing you want around the home. I recommend spending the money on more schooling which is a better use of the huge amount of cash that it costs to have raised floors, UPS systems, diesel generator, or whatever else it will take to get this guys expanding inferiority complext smothered. I bet anything the poster is a short fellow too! ;)
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Before you go turning your home into a datacenter, call your city's building department and insurance company first or you might void your policy and/or break some laws.
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.
Lots of other people hit most of the points I would have made (and I have primary responsibility for a server room with a raised floor).
Consider just raising the computers, not the whole floor! You could use shelving (you could have some great, custom shelving made for your room much cheaper than you could buy the cheapest raised floor), or milk cartes as another did (as I do this with guitar amps), or anything else. Just run the cables under these. If you do the custom shelving, you can get a front panel. It could be like a 3" to 6" high shelf with cabinet doors in front. It can be painted, stained, carpeted, covered in red velvet, sprayed with truckbed liner, covered with beaten copper, layered in kevlar, or covered any way you like.
Or you could make some sort of custom gutter around the floor/wall junction, instead of hanging gutters. You can get these with a strip that closes them up.
You could use the little gutters that look sort of like skinny chair rails, at chair rail height. These are made for wiring added after the fact.
You have lots of options, all cheaper, easier, and safer than a raised floor.
I used to design labs and data centers for Cisco. IMO, the best reason for raised floor is to provide controlled, high volume HVAC directly to racks as needed. If you don't require additional cooling, then a wire-only raised floor is less useful (besides more expensive) than simply running overhead cable trays.
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It seems every reponse that has been modded up are people who are pointing out things you likely have already thought of. Today's slashdot: Ask for suggestions, get flamed. Nice.
.I just used them to bolt that extra 4x4 post come up off the floor.).
Once you have the base frame (think 'cornerlines in a cube' to visualize) you will want to place support beams through the middle parallel to the short side to support the plywood top you'll be putting on. Use 2x4 hangers screwed into the 2x6 sides and place them approximately every 14-18 inches giving you 2x4 cross beams. This will help support the plywood top and give you a firm surface.
Let us assume that you have considered the possibility of flooding, you understand you *could* put in a ceiling, and you really are looking at making it look nice. You said the constraint is the ceiling, but the fact of your asking makes me think the constraint is the pocket book. I'm assuming this isn't a server room since you did say 'pc room'.
I had a similar issue with space. I wanted to house 8-14 machines at any one point running off up to 3-4 monitors with an 'L' shaped desk that covered about 7x5 feet. No amount of ceiling is going to help me find room for my legs when some of them are consumer towers, some are 4U rackmounts on their sides, and some are cute little systems. I knew I'd be moving systems in and out on occasion. I wanted a raised floor to put them all under so the machines were close enough to be hooked to my monitors and switch boxes without extensions, yet still be out of the way, accessible enough, and more importantly quiet (without spending gobs of money every time I brought a new system in to add to the bunch every couple weeks just to make it quiet). My solution was a raised floor for my desk (and only my desk). To do something like this economically (though not necessarily prettily) can be accomplished for under 200 bucks.
Picture of mine
Building a free standing platform that will hold a good half ton (put down the fritos if this isn't enough) for you, your desk, rolly chair, and 2 or three others isn't too difficult and all you need is a workbench to do some sawing and drilling.
You can build a platform that has 18" of clearance (enough space that a mid tower can slide under) that stands 24" tall (you can get a full tower in tilted and lean it upwards between crossbeams) with a single 4x4x8', two 2x6x12', eight or so 2x4x8', a couple sheets of 1/2" plywood (preferably higher quality so you dont have to sand) and a plethora of bolts, braces, joist hangers. If you check out the first link there, you can see the mid towers that just fit under the floor, and a full tower showing it being the same height as the floor.. Build the base of the frame by attaching 2x6 pieces to the 4x4 legs with a pair of bolts at each juncture (so each 4x4 would have 4 bolts running through, 2 per side in that corner). When drilling the holes (a drill press helps here), make sure to offset one side by 1/2" up or down (you dont want the bolts meeting each other in the middle of the 4x4). Picture of a corner (with braces leading up to an extra post I was using to let a cockatoo visit, dont ask. You can use similar big corner braces like those if you want, but they arent necessary .
Once you have your crossbeams in place and everything bolted in, this platform should be rock solid before you put your plywood top on. The plywood you can cut however is most convenient for you. I didn't need a traditional raised floor where you could pull up a 'tile' at any 2 foot interval. I was happy enough to crawl under for the few times I'd need to get under there for initial setups. You may want to work in some access panels or make the top modular. It is really up to you (though you'll need to figure out the way to make it stable and size your crossbeams appropriately). You may also need to deal