Office of 30 people. Ineffective under floor heating in the 1st floor main sales office which is being supplemented (against my advice) by fan heaters in cold weather which are putting too much load on our supply…. so much so that it blew a 60amp supply fuse last week blacking us out completely until we could source a replacement fuse.

We’re looking at splitting our server room onto a separate board to address the loading issue but it’s made me think…

We’re paying £s in running costs of our air con system to dump oodles of warm air from our server room into the ether.

My idea is some sort of exhaust fan / heat recovery system which we can use to extract air from the server room to the sales office over the winter. There are existing ventilation voids which could be used to run ducting I think.

Anyone done anything similar?

I have a domestic system.

They are called Mechanical Heat Recovery Ventilation (MHVR) units.

I got mine through these guys. Theyre easy to talk to

http://www.cvcdirect.co.uk/

Extract air? Where is the inlet air to replace it going to come from?

could you not just open the door to the server room and use a fan to push/pull the warm air out?

of just literally have an extractor fan in the server room wall you switch on in cold weather to pull air from server room to the other one?

both will end up pulling air into the server from the normal office but it’ll get circulated.

Depends on what type of air con application. If its chillers rather than spilt (VRF) systems then its more straight forward.

I work for Carrier, I’ll happily take a look at the system you currently have and see if something can be done with your existing make up.

Extract air? Where is the inlet air to replace it going to come from?

It’s vented. Our server room is secure, but not airtight!

could you not just open the door to the server room and use a fan to push/pull the warm air out?

Security issues – also wrong part of the building – the server room opens into the new part of the building. The heat is required in the older part and on the upper floor.

of just literally have an extractor fan in the server room wall you switch on in cold weather to pull air from server room to the other one?

That’s along the lines of what I’m thinking but not sure of the heat loss in what would be around 5M of ducting to get it where we need it.

It’s vented. Our server room is secure, but not airtight!

Of course, but your server room will output a large amount of air at a relatively low temperature – not particularly good for this sort of thing unless you can use a lot of the air. And to do that, you need an inlet suitable for large amounts of air into your server room which must be within certain tolerances for the IT hardware, air/air heat exchangers, or a chilled water system.

Well I never professed to be an expert which is why I’m asking for heat recovery advice on a mountain biking forum 🙂

@Wilsonthecat – thanks for the offer – the current cooling system is a Daikin Inverter if that helps.

@scuzz Actually thinking about it, the server room does already have a supplementary ventilation system with fan inlets at floor level to bring in air from outside. There are corresponding fan outlets at ceiling height to extract the hot air which at the moment just vent to cowls set in the roof.

Brilliant! In this scenario there’s no reason why you couldn’t outlet into the building instead of outside. However, I’m presuming that this system isn’t used much in winter because of very cold outside air that is inputted directly into the server room?
Any hot airflow out of the server room needs to be replaced, this will be by fans from outside – unfortunately the times you need the heat for the office are also the times that you have the coldest air outside which needs to be preheated before it enters the server room!

I could talk all day about this, check your emails 🙂

server rooms always have independent cooling systems as they need to operate 24hrs a day as opposed to the office system which may only run for around 10hrs.

Obviously you only need to heat the office in winter, so you need a system that can be adjusted elsewhere in summer.

basically its not really commercially viable. Heat recovery works in the main office and takes heat from one area and moves it to where it is needed, but as part of a big system. the server room is always independent, so just cools….or in your case extracts as well, which is unusual.