Cooling Challenges! - Personal Rig Update 2015 Part 6
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
3,027 words · ~15 min read
0:00
so we're back on the site of personal rig update 2015 now some of you pointed
0:05
out that putting all this computer equipment into a closet could lead to
0:11
overheating issues and while this room
0:14
actually is technically an exterior room this is an insulated wall right here and
0:20
through this Gap is direct access to the outside and through that Gap is direct
0:24
access to the attic it's only passively ventilated and in practice we've gone
0:29
from being pretty close to outdoor temperature to it being about 13° C
0:34
putting this equipment in initially to it being about 18° C on a warm day here
0:39
in April so from past experience I'm expecting it to go as high as 35 to 40°
0:45
C In the Heat of the midsummer obviously
0:50
that's not acceptable so we're going to have to put a contingency plan into
0:54
action welcome to personal rig update 2015 part whatever the crap this is and
0:59
yes I know it's not 2015 anymore ventilating the
1:11
room the Arya headphones from Phoenix come complete with a cardioid clip mic
1:16
and acoustic Chambers constructed entirely of Japanese Pinewood check out
1:20
the link in the video description to learn more now as a number of you have noted
1:25
on at least several occasions I'm not particularly handy and when it comes to
1:29
knock walking out walls and installing
1:32
ventilation fans I am not going to be anyone's First Choice as a general
1:37
contractor so I have brought in my crack
1:40
team Mark and Praxis who are going to be
1:44
well helping me with basically doing it for me but before they can do that
1:49
there's some stuff I need to do because I've already started using this room as
1:53
storage again and I've been informed that all this yes even this that I
1:58
worked so hard to put in here has to come out I guess we'll start by
2:03
shutting everything down I'm going to have no internet today or
2:06
tomorrow how will I live it's like a fish with no internet or water well here
2:12
we go I'm just going to have to haul this out of
2:16
here my ceiling mounted access
2:19
point there we go such winers o we don't
2:23
have power o we're running on battery I
2:26
don't actually have power in this room so this is a power car that runs through
2:31
the wall to uh an outlet and then everything else here is also just kind
2:35
of running through that same hole which is just a hole I made in the drywall is
2:39
there perhaps while we're redoing these walls is there perhaps a more elegant
2:42
way to achieve this well I could actually put outlets on this wall
2:46
something I should have done 6 years ago basically yeah yeah yeah okay suggestion
2:51
for your lighting LED pot light oh neat
2:54
low voltage wow those are really small so the Transformer it only uses 12 WS Al
3:01
I'm not going to have like the the incandescent page thing hanging off the
3:05
yeah yeah that's it just what you don't like this not really oh well I think I
3:10
actually did even put this in myself now that I think about it yeah it was broken
3:14
in this room I put this in did I do okay no
3:21
oh so I mean this is bizarre I I told
3:25
Mark I still had some more of this like
3:28
uh particle board with like a primed side stuff and he and I was like yeah
3:33
you can you can totally have that we you can put more of it in there he's like
3:38
you um so we are going to be ripping all of that out as opposed to just doing the
3:43
parts we need to access and drywalling it you can see it's really sturdily
3:47
constructed I mean it's not like he's taking it apart with his hands that's
3:51
totally not a thing that's happening let's see if I can pull it off with my hands never oh wow yeah that is not very
3:57
good I feel like He-Man just ripping walls apart fun fact never actually seen
4:03
an episode of He-Man I don't even know if He-Man is the name of the show He-Man
4:07
might just be like a guy on some other show you know what amazing I told Mark I
4:11
was going to be here to help today he still brought a helper I can't figure out why inexplicable I took an
4:17
electrical course in high
4:21
school thank you so uh I'm equipped with
4:25
my manly purple mask and my light I'm
4:29
going to go find out where those damn Cat 5 cables go to I think it's possible
4:34
that they actually go to the uh to the
4:37
garage like I think the house was kind
4:40
of wired for Ethernet but like not properly so if they go around the front
4:45
and across that way then that will be what they were for but it doesn't
4:50
actually look like they do one of them goes this way where are you going and
4:55
why are you going there e cobwebs ass
4:58
sper what the hell I figured out what it is okay they're using it as speaker wire
5:04
this is for the um it's for the ceiling
5:07
mounted speakers in the living room I don't understand why they're using C 5
5:11
for that maybe there's some reason but that explains it okay so that means that
5:17
this how the heck did they manage to do a drop unless
5:22
oh this goes straight down into that
5:26
wall oh that's cool that means if I wanted to run anything else in that wall
5:30
than I could and that is also how
5:34
they're getting coax in there I think
5:38
okay now I get it so now that we've got
5:41
everything torn out we've got a clear look at what we're working with and I
5:45
can outline exactly what the plan is we're going to pull off of this light
5:50
switch box right here and we're going to put an outlet in this room rather than
5:53
having me run a power bar through the wall because I'm sure that the fire department would freak out if they saw
5:58
that next we're going to install this low voltage uh LED lighting Dad we have
6:05
an inline 190 CFM fan which we'll use to
6:09
pump air into the room we need to control that with a cooling thermostat
6:13
and this is a low voltage connection and this is 120 volt so we need to use a
6:19
relay to have this tell the relay what to do in order to tell the fan what to
6:23
do okay so basically we're going to climb down into the sopit area down
6:28
there where conveniently there are already some ventilation duct things
6:32
that are for keeping this uh this insulation up here ventilated and we're
6:37
going to put like a service panel in here and just have it create a positive
6:41
air pressure situation in this room and then for ventilation out of the room
6:46
what we're thinking is we're just going to leave like maybe 6 to 8 in of free
6:51
space here in the drywall on the ceiling so that it can just passively exhaust
6:55
into the attic just like that so uh we
6:59
have a plan it's exactly the plan I would have come up with on my own
7:03
too so they're making me vacuum the rodent
7:07
poop guess I get that sort of my rodent
7:10
poop not theirs so the first step which you can
7:15
see practice working on here is using a combination of the included mounting
7:18
hardware and a little bit of Fabrication in the sofits to create a mounting point
7:23
for the intake fan that's going to cool the room the fan itself uh is free
7:29
flowed with with air um so we need to put a damper in so that when you don't
7:33
want air flowing in there say in the winter when it's cold you want this
7:37
to stop the air flow cool now the last step to make all
7:43
of this even have a point at all is to
7:46
insulate the ceiling because that is where the heat is coming from from the
7:50
Sun hitting the shake roof and basically conducting heat directly into this room
7:56
now fortunately this is relatively straightforward because we've already
7:59
got strapping right here so we're still going to have enough air flow through
8:02
here to keep the wood from rotting but we are going to have to fill it with
8:06
insulation and cover it with drywall in
8:09
order to make this room effectively part of the house rather than part of the
8:13
outside so phase one of the electrical work is actually pretty much done so
8:19
we've borrowed 120 volt power from the old incandescent pulley chain light that
8:24
used to be up here and we have brought it into this box right here so this is
8:30
where the light switch for our new LED light is actually going to go this guy
8:35
is going to contain this relay right here as well as this Transformer which
8:39
is going to take the 120 volt in and turn it into 24v power that our cooling
8:44
thermostat can handle without frying itself whenever the fan engages so
8:49
basically what should happen is when the temperature reaches a certain threshold
8:53
when it gets too warm it'll connect the circuit and in theory that'll turn on
8:58
the fan which as you guys can probably hear is
9:02
working just dandy
9:06
exciting so for the next stage in the project we're working on putting that
9:10
electrical Jack in as well as a better pass through into the room over here the
9:15
other update here is that the ducting is now installed so it's pretty
9:18
straightforward stuff we've just got some little metal accordion style
9:23
ducting here and then some foil tape affixing one duct to the fan on this
9:28
side so that that's where the exhaust is going to come into the room and then on
9:31
the other end we've got another piece of duct that's going right down to the sfet
9:36
where we're going to have to cut a ho for it outside now the clever among you
9:39
have probably realized at this point that that is just going to draw air not
9:44
only from the outside but also from the rest of the attic where we haven't
9:48
insulated and it's going to be quite hot no not so because we're going to jam
9:53
some insulation around the edges of it so that it can only draw air from the
9:57
outside okay so with the p over most of
10:00
the insulation in the walls now and the
10:04
drywall mostly well sort of maybe about half up we're ready to do an update
10:09
because once this wall is drywalled in this LED light is going to be
10:13
permanently mounted so it locks into the
10:16
connector a little something like that then we are going to simulate the
10:21
switch by joining these wires and there you
10:25
go it's an LED light and Brandon's going to have to adjust his exposure oh he's
10:29
is going to have to do it again oh he's going to have to do it one more time oh no oh no l is is live with the
10:34
light so that's going to go on the
10:37
wall so this is a quick status update more than anything else I realized that
10:42
the fan is a little on the loud side it's actually audible even through the
10:46
wall so what we're going to add is just a simple dimmer switch and we're just
10:50
going to tape it up box it inside here and close it away because it's not the
10:55
kind of thing that you would adjust very often and the other things that we can
10:58
have a look at that have changed since last time is that the fan has been
11:02
completely insulated around now so we are getting nice cool air like that is
11:07
Frosty air from outside and finally this
11:11
puppy has been reframed for a nice big access panel if in the future I want to
11:16
run oh I don't know more you know foone lines or coax lines or even power from
11:23
my garage or to anywhere else in the house because from here I can access the
11:27
entire upstairs and over to the garage now I don't have to
11:32
crawl through like I did the other day see much easier so we are pretty much at
11:37
the end the room is drywalled and mudded
11:40
the access hatch has been mostly created it just needs a bit of a handle on the
11:44
outside and check this out this dimmer
11:48
switch has been wired in it's kind of a getaway of doing it I know in a perfect
11:53
world you know the uh RPM of the fan
11:56
would be modulated by temperature as opposed to just by manually doing this
12:02
but this is functional since it's the kind of thing that I'm only going to have to set probably once a season
12:06
anyway so here's how it works we've got the fan on auto the system is set to
12:10
cool and if we turn the threshold down
12:14
the cooling fan kicks in but if I kind of go oh gee that's
12:19
really loud all I've got to do is before I close up this little access panel turn
12:24
that dimmer switch down and we can find the perfect balance between acoustic and
12:29
temperatures so finally the last step before benchmarking we've got to put a
12:34
grill on the outside air intake which is under the S here preferably one that is
12:39
B proof you know so that I don't have bees in my attic thank you for thinking
12:43
of that um and then we can Benchmark it
12:47
and find out just how well the system works yay
12:54
Wheels okay down
13:03
so all that's left now is the final
13:07
Benchmark so in order to evaluate whether this was a success or failure
13:11
because I don't want to just wait around for the summer and for the computers to
13:16
all overheat to find out is to look at
13:19
what the CPU temperature is under a heavy load relative to the outside
13:25
temperature when we're running intensive applications so I'm going to run heaven
13:31
in a window as opposed to full screen oops as well as Ida 64 CPU Benchmark in
13:37
order to evaluate what it will be like in a worst case scenario with the door
13:44
closed with our new cooling system off
13:48
and then with the new cooling system engaged and so here you have it guys
13:54
this is the result operation cool this
13:58
room appears for now to have been a success bringing in cool air from the
14:03
outside is going to help a lot to keep this room cool and at the rate that that
14:08
fan moves air we are circulating all of
14:11
the air in this room like every minute
14:14
or so not really giving the systems any time to heat up more than they normally
14:20
would well that was fun watching me get burned by the contractor among other
14:25
things but you don't have to get burned if you switch over to Ting the mobile
14:30
carrier that is focused on customer service and satisfaction first when you
14:35
call them this is crazy I actually tried it because I didn't actually quite
14:39
believe it when you call them you do not speak to a robot you get put through
14:43
directly to a person they answer the phone they're like hello this is Tang
14:47
what and the way that their billing works is different from other carriers
14:52
you don't have to commit to like 200 talk minutes during Prime hours and blah
14:56
blah blah megabytes you pay for only what you use and the average Ting bill
15:01
is only $24 per month per device if
15:05
you're stuck in a contract and you switch to Ting they'll cover 25% of your
15:08
cancellation Fe up to $75 and if you head over to l.com which is linked in
15:13
the video description when you sign up at our link you'll get 25 bucks in
15:16
service credit or towards a new device and the savings calculator is worth your
15:21
time all you do is enter your last few bills from your existing carrier and
15:25
Ting crunches some numbers and tells you whether you would save money by
15:28
switching to tting so check it out at the link in the video
15:32
description so thanks for coming along for this wild ride if you guys disliked
15:36
the video hit the dislike button but if you want to see yet another personal rig
15:40
update 2015 that I have planned hit the
15:44
like button cuz I do have something in mind or even consider subscribing if you
15:48
really enjoyed the video and you want to see more now that you're done doing all
15:52
that stuff you're probably wondering hm gee how would I support lus Tech tips maybe you could buy a cool shirt like
15:56
this one change your Amazon bookmark one with our affiliate code join our
15:59
community Forum where you can ask and answer Tech questions or just hey watch
16:03
one of our other videos like this recent episode of Channel Super Fun that we all
16:07
think is awesome and we hope that you guys will as well