Brainstorming Further Cooling Improvements To The Linux Benchmarking Room

[kurly_b]

ROI is the highest with Solar, no doubt, but on a budget, stupid question, what about a natural gas powered generator to moderate the cost until you can afford solar.
The ones with the Digital Voltage Regulators can be setup to augment your power usage, voltage drops, and what not.
Just not sure if the is viable in your area.
Where I live, anything goes....... they build whole hotels without permits / environmental surveys.

[bridgman]

Where I live, anything goes....... they build whole hotels without permits / environmental surveys.

Yeah, that reminds me of traditional way to reduce power bills.... sneak over to your neighbor's house at night with an extension cord and run your systems off their meter.

That's not so common these days, but I imagine the increase in using the neighbor's internet connection has made up for it

[kurly_b]

Just go to Porto Rico, power company comes through a neighbourhood shutting off peoples power, and the guys come out right behind with car jumper cables restoring it......

[Michael]

My parents' house was built atleast 20 years earlier and it still makes settling noises every now and again..
Just to drive the point home: Make sure that anything you do add doesn't isolate. Most underlayments will have some sort of isolating capacity, because most people need that.

But +1 for foregoing this project and instead investing in solar panels...

This is the underlayment currently underneath the vinyl: http://www.lowes.com/pd_90773-22925-...ductId=3570560

Still figuring out whether I can get by without a tile underlayment, but otherwise it would look like this one: http://www.homedepot.com/p/Schluter-...RA5M/100143471 a tile membrane with mortar underneath and then obviously from the tile to the top of the membrane.

Unfortunately in this area it seems like a sufficient solar panel system would go for at least ~20k USD.

I estimate the tiling project to be about $500 or about $700 if going for the tile membrane.

[ckruetze]

Most suggestions so far are about how to reduce the heat. How about using it instead? Do you have a pool that could be heated or does your neighbour?

But if lower electricity bills is really your goal, I would also go for solar panels, yes, there is a big upfront cost for them, but maybe you could do some of the installation work yourself to save on costs.

[bridgman]

Michael, the cost for the solar system seems like it includes the whole battery bank thing for standby, but in your case don't you just need something that can cover most of your house load and optionally sell some power back to the grid for a pittance ? Not 100% sure but I thought those could run without a battery bank these days.

The panels are relatively cheap (maybe 20x$200 would cover most of your A/C draw), it's all the other stuff that costs. What I'm not sure of is how advanced your run-of-the-mill grid tie inverter is these days.

EDIT - yep, looks like a typical grid-tie system can operate without a battery bank, as long as you don't mind it shutting down during a power failure. There is at least one recently launched inverter which will provide house power during an outage without a battery bank, but most do not.

Looks like the R-factor on that underlayment is around 0.52, so more than the concrete slab. The part that's hard to model is the R-factor of the crushed stone under the slab, since that has a lot of air gap in it.

What you really want for cooling is slab-on-wet-clay

[kurly_b]

I got an estimate for (26) 200 watt transparent panels to go over an outdoor living space, including mounting assembly's for $15k, needed to add inverters and such.
CAT 5 Hurricane specs were meet also.
Something like these guys - http://www.solar-constructions.com/w...-solar-panels/

Does that $20K include installation, batteries, inverters?

Hell you can buy a pallet of panels (24) 250 watt on Amazon for $6k.
Need to fabricate the mountings yourself, but you seam pretty handy. Stainless Steel Unistrut is a wonderful thing......

Enough with the pie in the sky, solar.
If you rip up the floor to put in tile, run a floor radiate piping under it. Instead of hot water, circulate cold water through it.
Then run wye off your existing duct mounted fan, put damper in it, to redirect it from exhausting upstairs and route it outside, get another duct fan for make up air, duct to the bottom.

Knocked out a rough sketchup drawing, can't upload it. too big.

bridgman

We were typing about the same thing LOL.

[kurly_b]

bridgman
I'm waiting to tryout some of the 7KW Tesla Powerwall. Should have them it by mid summer....

[bridgman]

kurly_b: yeah, running some piping underground seems like the right answer. I saw a neat greenhouse design that had a bunch of ~6" pipes buried underneath it, not sure where the intakes were but the exhausts all came out in a bunch in the middle of the floor, looked like a snake invasion. Running brine through the pipes with a heat exchanger would be even better though like you say.

The Powerwall looks pretty neat, much slicker than a rack full of lead-acid. There's the whole catching-fire thing but Tesla products don't seem to do that very often.

[kurly_b]

As far as the catching fire thing, not going to mount them in an enclosed space. The property has a area / structures for generator, Main services, etc.

Yeah basically water cooling your floor.

Actually, I bid a job locally a year or two ago, that had a 24" header pipe with 6" pipes running to the other end, 5 foot on centre, to remove heat under 10,000 square foot refrigerated building.
Had a Big blower attached to the header. I didn't do the job, but know the guy who did, he said it worked well.