Computers and Temperature

A couple of days ago was the hottest day of the year, in the UK at least. For computers this you would have thought would be a nightmare. For my machines though, even with my dust problem, it's seemingly not.

In my bedroom/office I have 5 computers. Although only 4 are constantly running, that is quite a lot of heat and thus noise being pushed out by these machines. Fortunately, two are laptops (My MacBook and my iBook); these are not as badly affected by dust and heat than the desktops as they seem to be able to cool themselves down effectively.

You could say that this is because they are almost entirely plastic, which although being a good insulator is quite thin on the ground in a laptop.

The most of the problem comes from the desktops. They are both noisy and in confined spaces. The noise is less of a problem to me than space they are in, as this is of my own choosing. You could suggest that, if I were to move them, then surely I could eradicate the noise problem, unfortunately it is not that simple.

The problem with moving systems is that, among other things, I will have no where to put what was once there, the second problem is that there is now a problem with where to put them. Datacentre's typically have a style of airflow that allows systems to be cooled at the same time as keeping the ambient temperature of the server floor down. This keeps the levels of humidity and the general room heat down.

The latter is what my problem is at the moment. The position of the room itself is quite a problem. In the morning the room receives a full dose of sunlight until around 1pm. This has the effect of raising the room temperature by a dramatic amount, and then the wall insulation keeps this heat in whilst I try to lower it by keeping the one large, and other small window open. This is unfortunately not that successful until around 10pm at night when the temperature starts it slow nighttime decent.

The highest temperature that I have recorded over the last day or two is 29°C. At night this, still with all the windows open goes down to around 25. I have for the past two days been leaving windows open until around 1am. Although I can't check the accuracy of my thermometer, this is by far the warmest room in my house - bar of course the kitchen when the oven is on.

So, what can I do? Unless I were to build a mount - which would raise the two desktops off the ground and allow air circulation I am unable to do much. I can't afford to buy or run an aircon unit, and given that the current survival rate of my machines hasn't diminished I can't see a reason to need it.

Maybe it would be something more important if I were to run more machines, for the moment though, it would be a bit silly - I can't use 5 as it is...