ᐅ Exhaust Ventilation / Air Ventilation for the Utility Room

Hello,

I am currently considering the setup for my equipment room, specifically the location for my 19" rack. This is not a typical equipment room with heating and so on, but rather a roughly 1.5m² (16 sq ft) “room within a room,” where only a 42U 19" rack will be placed. Inside it, building automation, multi-room amplifiers, audio and video patch panels, NAS, AV receivers, network equipment, and so forth will be housed. The rack is quite full, but I have not yet performed a precise heat dissipation calculation.

This will be located in my home office, meaning I plan to install two drywall partitions perpendicular to an exterior wall to create a niche about 1m (3.3 ft) wide and 1.5m (5 ft) deep. Currently, the office has a glass door, as I would like the equipment to be visible. The wall extensions that form the side walls of this “room” will stand free in the space. It looks approximately like in the attached pictures. Of course, I could also place the rack freely in the room, but I want to avoid visible cables and aim for as quiet an environment as possible.

Now the question is: What is the best way to remove the warm air? Install a wall fan blowing the air toward the office? Use the intake of the mechanical ventilation system (MVHR) to draw the air through it? The fresh air supply for the room will come through a low-level grille either in the door or the side walls. The rack does not contain high-performance servers producing hundreds of watts of heat, but it cannot be completely airtight either.

What is in the room above? An attic by any chance? Then you could nicely vent the air upwards. Considering what you want to put into the rack, a lot of exhaust air will accumulate. If that air just ends up in your room, you will never have good air quality – or you will always have to keep the window open.

There is basically nothing above, as the home office will be located in an extension with a flat roof. However, a direct exhaust to the outside seems unfavorable to me with a tight building envelope in combination with the controlled ventilation system. It behaves similarly to a ducted kitchen range hood, I believe.

I would try to make use of the waste heat in winter – when I look at how much heat our media cabinet in the living room produces, it’s incredible. Inside there are only 1 PC, a NAS, receiver, DVD player, Fritzbox, and some small devices...

You probably have a heat exchanger in your mechanical ventilation with heat recovery system, right? Then I would run it through that if it’s possible without too much effort.

Controlled residential ventilation with a heat exchanger is definitely going to be installed. Today's Google search also showed that it will probably be done via the controlled residential ventilation system. In case of emergency, an additional opening in the exterior wall can be made if that is not sufficient.

Solve it with controlled residential ventilation. Ideally, use supply and exhaust air twice. This way, you can also seal the area well, resulting in minimal noise emissions.