Church Related Information Technology Blog

UPDATED – See updated “professional” version below!
My office houses all of the IT equipment for the church. With all of the servers, switches, routers, firewalls, tape drives, etc. running, it gets very hot thru the night and when I open my office door in the morning the temperature is probably around 90 to 95 degrees.

Heat is not good for computer equipment. It causes solder points to expand and contract, resulting in ultimate failure. I can only imagine how hot the equipment is getting where it generates heat the most.

This article is obviously not very technical in nature. I didn’t measure the heat of my office or use an instrument to determine the temperature of CPU on the servers. (this could be done thru the server management console, of course). There are some very pricey and technical methods of heat extraction. This solution worked for me. It’s not very pretty but now that we know that it works we can find a better looking solution in the future. Unfortunately I broke the ceiling tile while trying to cut the circle in it. That doesn’t help the aesthetic issue much!

John 9:25 is a great example of not over analyzing things that just work.

John 9:25 He answered and said, Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.

So make fun of my solution if you will, but one thing I know: it once was hot but now its not! lol!

UPDATE!  2/18/2012

The fan in my redneck setup quit working. The basic principal worked so I found a professional fan at a bargain store and I had it (uh hum) professionally installed by our resident maintenance man and our resident electrician. Just kidding about the (uh hum) guys. Ernie and Jerry did a fabulous job! Thanks to them our IT room is staying cooler than ever.