Air Conditioning - Keeping It Cool
Let's face it. 5 computers can give off some heat. Especially if you are in a room with poor air circulation or a small room. I used to suffer through it with my original setup and eventually installed a "whisper quiet" bathroom fan to help vent the air outside. It worked and helped quite a bit but it was always warmer than I would have liked. It also required cutting a hole in my house - something not everybody can do. When I revised my setup, I made the decision to do everything right - this included environmental controls.
You need to do SOMETHING to think about keeping yourself and your equipment cool. If nothing else, your computers will not like the heat and will start to corrupt the memory, reboot randomly or simply wear out faster (hard drives in particular). Be sure to have adequate fans in place at the minimum - you can pick up fans cheaply at monoprice.com - newegg charges too much to ship. Be sure to allow for proper air flow through the back of your machines too - cramming them into a wall might be a bad idea.
So, you want to cool yourself and your computers. How?
Cooling falls into two main strategies:
1. Fans
2. AC Units
Fans / Forced Air Circulation
If you can simply vent the air somewhere, that usually works - provided you are able to capture it all and prevent it from radiating out into the room. Simply turning a fan on will only cool you though as your sweat evaporates. Your computers will not benefit from this, other than the moving the hotter air away from them, which will probably be fairly minimal. The hot air will continue to build up though unless it has somewhere to go.
Your fan solution can be as simple as a standing fan or as complex as an inline duct fan or even a custom built box to direct the air through your computers and outside. None of which work well unless they can capture the heat as it is produced and get rid of it right away.
AC Units
These fall into several categories. The simple ""through the wall" AC unit is the cheapest. They are also VERY LOUD. They contain the compressor and the fan and neither of which are usually designed to be quiet. These tend to be the cheapest though and you get what you pay for. Figure you will pay $200 to $400 for one of these. Most run off of 120V AC power but pull A LOT of power, so don't expect to put one and 5 computers on the same breaker. They require a window to vent the hot air out of.
The next unit up is a portable AC unit. These range in price from $500 to $900 for the sizes you would want for boxing. They are usually on wheels and are designed to cool up to about 1 Ton (12000 BTU) - which is what you will likely need, depending on your climate, personal needs, room size, room insulation, etc. These DO need to be vented somehow - you usually have a few feet of hose though and many come with window adapters. You could also cut a hole in your wall and properly caulk and seal it and install a self closing baffle to keep pests out when it is not in use. Many of these run on 120V AC, so they are easy to use but also take up a lot of power.
The next step up is what I consider the ultimate setup (short of designing a house's duct system with a separate zone for your computer space). It is called a ductless, or mini split AC unit. I just finished installing mine and the results are incredible. The compressor sits outside, just like a normal central air system (only a little smaller). 4 lines run to the indoor unit, up to 40 or so feet away. Which means you will likely need to cut a hole in your wall, but only about 3" in diameter. The 4 lines are an electrical conduit, drain lines and copper gas and liquid lines. These units are hardwired and usually considered permanent installs. They will most likely require a professional install to run electrical and charge the unit with "freon" or its equivalent. But boy are they SILENT. If you put it on maximum blast and stand next to it, you can hear it - but compared to a normal "through the window" unit, it is night and day. Perhaps 40 db vs 70 - 80 - and remember, decibels is a logarithmically scaled measure, not linear. I had a 2 Ton (24000 BTU) unit installed and my average room temperature went from 85+ to 70 degrees. The actual unit is mounted some 30 odd feet away no less! I can't hear it at all from here, which was the point. I moved EVERY computer away from my monitors and inputs to keep the increasingly loud roar and whines to a minimum. Mini splits cost around $1500 to $2000 for a professional install and the unit. Units themselves are generally $800 to $1000 with an extra $250 for fittings and pipe, usually not included.
Other than a duct based system, you are not going to get a quieter solution than a mini split (ductless) system. Real popular in Europe, Asia and the Middle East but not very common in the USA.
I would like to elaborate a bit more on this topic at a later date. No guarantee I will do so here though.
