Originally posted by Michael
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You could get a small packaged air conditioner for a few hundred dollars and install it in that room. If it's a window unit, you'll have to cut a hole in the wall (where it will reject heat to an adjacent room). If it has a ducted exhaust (better), you could install a small round duct or reuse existing ducts to send hot exhaust air to another part of the house. I spotted a previous article about the duct silencer, so it looks like you have a good exhaust duct candidate already installed. Could you reverse the airflow through the duct to exhaust heated (from a packaged AC unit) back up to your front office? It might be a very easy and convenient solution that doesn't require knocking holes in your walls. Then you could regulate the temperature in your server room and the AC unit would only use electricity when it needs to move a bit of heat. That may end up actually being more energy efficient than a ventilation fan.
A few years ago I was going to build my own refrigerator. Without really analysing the situation I figured that dumping heat outside during cold Canadian winters would be like free refrigeration. Like an idiot I bought a bunch of copper pipe and some other supplies, then decided to actually look at the situation more closely. When I ran some numbers and actually looked at the energy balance (I'm an engineer) it turns out that it's WAY more cost effective to run the compressor in the fridge to pump that heat back into the living space. It's just one of those things that at first glace seems to make sense, but when you dig into it more deeply a very different situation is presented. I ended up building my own super efficient fridge anyway, but that's another story.
26000 kWh is about 71.2 kWh per day, which is about 3 kW of heat rejection into that room. 3 kW works out to be about 10000 BTU in air conditioning freedom units, so you'll probably want to add a bit extra to that, say 12000 - 15000 BTU? This little critter would do the trick, and it would probably even bolt up to your existing duct without much trouble. https://www.danby.com/products/porta...rs/dpa140b1wb/ Really any AC unit would work, I just picked one from the website of a very common big box store. I'm also having a hard time wraping my head around how that little 530 cfm duct and fan is maintaining the temperature in that room. Really that shouldn't be anywhere near enough airflow to maintain a temperature less than sauna with 3 kW of heat input. Is there other heat leakage out of that room somehow?
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