Many engineers and contractors are facing increasing concern about comfort (residential) cooling units being misapplied to computer room applications. Prior to 2010 there was no required energy efficiency standard for computer room cooling equipment in the United States.  Today, federal regulations require computer room cooling equipment to meet a minimum Sensible Coefficient of Performance (SCOP) while similar municipal and state conservation codes are continuously evolving. 

A logical starting place to discuss the grow process, and therefore the conditioning requirements, is with the mother plant in the mother room. To ensure consistency in the final product, the production plants are cloned from an existing mother plant. For this reason the health of the mother plants is critical to a successful grow operation.  The mother room may have redundancy requirements for the HVAC equipment that the other grow rooms don’t.

STULZ White Paper

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new white paper that I have authored on the topic of environmental control of cannabis grow rooms. Since many engineering firms are being asked to design a grow facility for the first time, it is my hope that this white paper will provide a good basis for understanding the unique challenges of the cannabis industry and how they can be addressed with the right equipment. 

For some time now, I have been working directly with some of the premier grow facilities in the United States, and this white paper outlines a great deal of what I have learned. I hope you find it informative.

Here is an excerpt from "Precision Environmental Controls for the Medical Cannabis Industry":

There has been much confusion in the engineering community as to which is the proper energy efficiency metric for computer room air conditioners (CRACs).  EER, SEER, COP, IPLV are still frequent topics of discussion even though SCOP is the only recognized efficiency metric for data center equipment, as detailed below.

I'd like to personally invite you to join me tomorrow at the Washington, D.C. & Mid-Atlantic Data Center Summit. The date is September 17th, at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, VA.

In our last post, we talked about the TC 9.9 thermal guidelines for data processing equipment and how they are providing an opportunity to use new, highly energy efficient technologies. In this post we will examine how we can achieve higher return air temperatures in your data center.

The enemy of high return air temperature is air mixing. So how do we prevent air mixing? There are several strategies that we will review but first, let’s talk a little bit about containment. At STULZ, we are staunch proponents of containment because we recognize that this allows our equipment to operate in its most efficient manner.

There have been some significant changes to the data center cooling industry in the last couple years. One of the most prominent changes has been the TC 9.9 Committee’s Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments that was released in 2011.

These new guidelines expanded the operating envelope within the data center. Now upon first glance it may not look like these guidelines have changed significantly but they have actually expanded the allowed server entering air temperatures such that we can now safely use innovative technologies to achieve greater efficiency in the data center. This has led to some interesting new technologies being introduced to the white space such as indirect evaporative cooling and chiller assisted cooling systems.

Load density, air distribution, floor tile positioning; data center design is more complicated than ever, but with some best practice considerations, creating an efficient, reliable data center design is within your grasp. 

Let's explore 10 Important Data Center Best Practices:

I'd like to personally invite you to join me next week at the Greater New York Data Center Summit. The date is April 14 in New York City at the Convene Center, just steps away from Wall Street at 32 Old Slip (between Water St and FDR).

Stop by our display table to discuss your precision air cooling needs, and stay for my panel discussion on: "Enabling New Design of Data Centers Today & Tomorrow: In Pursuit of the 'Model Data Center', and Innovative Solutions to Maximize Existing Infrastructure Including Fiber and Interconnects."