Server Room & Comms Room Cooling
Comfort cooling and equipment cooling are different jobs. An office system is designed for people, runs in office hours, and is allowed to fail on a Sunday. A server room runs every hour of the year and fails expensively.
What makes it different
It never stops
Equipment produces heat continuously, including at three in the morning in January when the office system is off. Server room cooling is specified to run all year, which changes the equipment and the controls.
It has to cope in winter
An outdoor unit is being asked to reject heat when it is below freezing outside. Ordinary comfort equipment is not always specified for that, and this is one of the most common reasons a comms room system fails in its first cold snap.
Failure has a cost attached
The question worth asking early is what happens to the business if the room gets hot. If the answer is serious, the system should be designed so that one failure does not stop the cooling — typically two units sharing the load, each able to hold the room alone, alternating so both stay exercised.
Somebody needs to know before it is too late
Temperature alarms matter as much as the equipment. A room that is quietly climbing at the weekend should be telling somebody.
What we look at
The heat output of the equipment in the room now and what is planned, the size and construction of the space, how air moves through the racks, where outdoor plant can go, the electrical supply, and what monitoring already exists. Small rooms are often worse than large ones, because a cupboard with a few servers in it has nowhere for the heat to go and is frequently ignored until something fails.
What we install
Systems specified for continuous operation and low outdoor temperatures, sized to the actual heat load rather than the room's floor area, with controls set for equipment rather than comfort. Where the room justifies it, two units in a duty and standby arrangement. And where it does not, we will say so rather than sell resilience you do not need.
Maintenance is not optional here
A comfort system that misses a service gets less efficient. A comms room system that misses a service eventually stops, and the cost of that is not the repair bill. These are the systems we most often recommend putting on a planned maintenance contract, and the ones where leak checking obligations are most likely to apply because they run hard all year.