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Server, comms and plant rooms
A server room runs the same load at four in the morning in January as it does on the hottest afternoon of the year, and it fails expensively when it gets hot. Comfort cooling is not designed for that. Close control is, and the difference shows up the first time something goes wrong at a weekend.
CoolIn designs, installs and maintains cooling for server rooms, comms rooms and small data suites across Manchester and the North West, from a single rack in a cupboard to a room running on N+1 with remote monitoring.
Why it is a different job
This is the single most common thing we are asked to put right. A comfort unit will cool a server room, right up until the day it does not, and the way it fails is specific and predictable.
Comfort cooling is built for a room full of people that empties at six and is shut at the weekend. A server room is at full load every hour of every day, including the coldest week of the year. Run a domestic split like that and you are running it well outside what it was designed for.
Most comfort units are not built to cool when it is near freezing outside, and will refuse to run or trip on low pressure. That is fine in an office, which wants heating in January. In a server room it means the cooling stops in the one situation where nobody is watching, and the room climbs.
When the single unit in the room fails, the clock starts immediately, and a small room with several racks in it heats up quickly. Two smaller units sharing the load, alternating so both stay exercised, means a failure is an inconvenience rather than an outage.
Server rooms have no occupants to notice. Without a temperature alarm the first sign of a failure is usually kit shutting itself down, often on a Friday night. A sensor and an alert cost very little against what an unplanned outage costs.
The options
The right answer scales with what is in the room and what an hour of downtime costs you. A comms cupboard and a room of racks are different problems.
Purpose built for technical spaces. Holds tighter temperature and humidity bands than comfort equipment, runs continuously year round, and is designed to handle the dry, high sensible load a room of servers actually presents.
A second unit sized so either can carry the room alone, with a controller alternating lead and lag so both stay exercised and neither sits idle for months. Standard on any room where an outage has a real cost.
For a smaller comms room, two dedicated units specified for low ambient operation and alternated weekly. Considerably cheaper than close control and a sound answer where the room is a cupboard rather than a suite.
Temperature and, where it matters, humidity sensing with an alert to a phone or an email address. The cheapest part of the whole job and the part that most often turns a disaster into a callout.
Budget
Installed prices covering equipment, labour, commissioning and handover. A technical room is priced on its heat load in kilowatts, on how much redundancy you want, and on where the condenser can go, so these are budget bands rather than quotations.
Guide prices, installed. Confirmed at site survey.
A rack or two, low criticality. Installed prices
Several racks, business critical. Installed prices
Multi rack or high density. Installed prices
These are guide bands, not quotations. A server room quote starts from the actual heat load, which we work out from the connected load of the kit in the room rather than from its floor area. That number, plus whether you want redundancy, decides almost everything else. The survey costs nothing.
Operation and duties
The design gets you a room that works. These three are what keep it working, and they are where most of the rooms we inherit have been let down.
The widely used industry guidance recommends keeping the air entering the equipment between roughly 18C and 27C. Running colder than that wastes electricity without making the hardware any happier.
Humidity matters in both directions. Too high and you risk condensation on cold surfaces. Too low and static becomes a genuine hazard when somebody works in the racks.
What actually matters is the temperature at the rack inlet, not the reading on a wall thermostat across the room, which is why sensor position is part of the design.
A room running at full load every hour of the year needs looking at more often than an office. Most server rooms we maintain are on four visits a year, checking filters, coil condition, refrigerant charge, drain operation and the alarm itself.
Testing the alarm is the part most often skipped, and an alarm nobody has proved is not resilience.
Our commercial servicing plan covers quarterly attendance, and we test the failover on rooms running a lead and lag pair.
Close control systems hold more refrigerant than a comfort unit, so a server room crosses the 5 tonne CO2 equivalent threshold more readily than most spaces of its size. Past that line the operator has to arrange leak checks and keep records.
Automatic leak detection can extend the interval between manual checks on larger systems, which is worth knowing before specifying.
The thresholds in full are on the commercial page, and we work out where your system sits at survey.
How it works
A free survey, a written price with the heat load working shown, and a programme set around your hours. The four stages are the same on every commercial job and are set out in full on the commercial page, along with servicing plans and what to do about breakdowns.
We cool server and comms rooms across Manchester, Salford Quays, Warrington, Stockport and the wider North West, including Manchester, Salford, Stockport, Warrington and Liverpool. See every town we cover.
Other business types
Each sector has its own page, because a server room and a hair salon are genuinely different jobs. The commercial overview covers what applies to all of them.
Questions
For a small comms cupboard it can work, provided the unit is specified for low ambient operation so it still cools when it is near freezing outside, and provided you accept that a failure means downtime. Standard comfort equipment installed without that specification is the most common cause of the winter failures we get called to.
Industry guidance recommends air entering the equipment between roughly 18C and 27C. Many rooms are run far colder than they need to be, which costs real money in electricity and gains nothing. The measurement that counts is at the rack inlet rather than on a wall.
It depends entirely on what an hour of downtime costs you. If the room only runs a switch and a file server, one properly specified unit plus an alarm is reasonable. If the business stops when the room stops, two units sized so either can carry the load alone is the only sensible answer.
With no alarm, the room heats until the equipment protects itself or fails, and you find out on Monday. With a sensor and an alert you get a message while there is still time to open a door, bring in temporary cooling or shut things down in an orderly way. It is the cheapest resilience you can buy.
Usually four times a year rather than once. The load is constant, the run hours are far higher than comfort equipment, and the alarm needs proving as well as the cooling. Quarterly attendance is what our commercial plan is built around.
Yes. We plan the work so the room is never left without cooling for longer than it can safely tolerate, using temporary cooling during the changeover where the heat load makes that necessary. That sequencing is set out in the quote rather than improvised on the day.
Free survey
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