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."

Comments

basement bad

[Apreche]

basement bad! water, flooding, other things in basement! You definitely don't want to do it in your basement, especially in a normal house.

Don't do it.

[Schezar]

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.

Maybe raised floor isn't the answer...

[rocjoe71]

...when you're in a basement, *IF* there's any flooding, it's going to soak all your wiring and whatever else you stash under the floor.

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.

Lets ask why raised floors were invented

[tod_miller]

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.

raised floor envy

[JDizzy]

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! ;)

Better alternatives

[Roadkills-R-Us]

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.