Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Cooling My A/V Closet

How quickly they forget.

Well, Jack, you're our resident expert on forgetting things...

To close out this thread, I thought I'd post pictures of the finished solution. Thanks to you all for your suggestions. The final solution was a passive register near the bottom to let cool air in, and an active bathroom fan vent near the top to blow it out.

In an unplanned test, last night while watching a movie, I forgot to turn the fan on in the closet (you can't hear it from my seating area, so it's easy to forget) and about halfway through the movie I could hear the PS3 going into jet engine mode again... Fortunately, the fan was not on, which supports everything said earlier in this thread. You definitely need a way for air to get in as well as out. The single vent is not enough to do the job adequately.

Pics below. Thanks again folks.

Jason

Passive Register


Broan (1.0 sone) bathroom fan in closet above A/V Rack

Jason,

To open this thread , you may want to wire a thermostat in series with the fan wiring. Then you can leave the fan switch on and have it kick in when the temperature exceeds the thermo setting.

For all interested in this thread-
My job is to provide cooling solutions for datacenters. Occassionally we have customers with small wiring closets. The main objective is to provide cool air into the room and remove the hot air to prevent mixing. If you duct the hot air out to the attic or plenum space then you need to make sure that space can either exhaust to the outside or gets returned somehow to your A/C system. If the hot air continually builds up in the attic/plenum then this won't do much but buy you some time.
If you have serious heat issues in a small space, APC makes a ventilation unit that will remove up to 3kW of heat.
http://www.apcc.com/products/family/index.cfm?id=337

Thanks for the comment Leslie. The attic has ridge and soffit vents, so the air should be able to escape the attic as well.

Mojo, at some point I may go that route. For now, I'm done screwing around in my closet for awhile.

Forget what? What were we talking about?