Hello,

We have a normal wood cabinet (like one would find in a kitchen) in our Laundry room. The Laundry room backs into the Family room where we have all our HT setup. We want to take over this cabinet and store all our gear in there. An HTPC, DirecTV HD Recorder, 7.1 Denon Receiver, a VCR (yes we have one of those still) and some other assorted junk. We were worried about cooling so we bought this cooling fan (http://www.cool-components.com/m6_view_item.html?m6:item=VS-CW-102WB) from cool components.

It will pull the cool air in from the Laundry room (we do not run the laundry too often and the dryer air blows outside) and push it through the cabinet to the other vent on the opposite side of the cabinet - that vents out into the hallway.

The cabinet is a classic styled wooden kitchen cabinet. It is 4' wide, 2' deep, and 3' tall. It has a built-in (non adjustable) shelf about 1'6" off the cabinet floor.

The question I have is - do we need to mod the cabinet to allow for the proper air flow - as without a mod the fan will blow on one of the two levels - but air cannot get down to the lower level or higher level - wherever we place the fan?

If we need to mod - these are the ideas we have had - any ideas would be great!

1) Cut out the middle shelf and bolt two 19" x 21" racks slotted shelves to the back of the cabinet and allow for air flow and a place to put the components. We lose some space - but air flow is good. The cons to this idea is that we have no real place to bolt the shelves to as the studs on our back wall are all messed up - some are 14" apart and some are more - a mess.

2) Cut out the shelf and leave a 1" -2" rim and then fortify the rim by placing blocking under the rim and then buy a 4' x 2' bulk rack shelf and place it in there (would need to scribe some of the dry wall - but no biggie).

So do we need to remove the shelf or can we make do with the shelf by maybe drilling holes in it or some other crazy idea?

Any help would be really appreciated!!!!

Please help - I really could you some pointers!

I'm no expert, and don't have a clear visual of what your are trying to do, but here are my suggestions/questions:

1) Are you leaving the doors off of the cabinet, or is it going to be closed up.? If you have the doors off/open, and enough space above each of the components, you might be "ok" with ventilation. May still need some fans, but at least you will have somewhere for the heat to escape.

2) The Denon is likely your hottest component, and your HD recorder is likely your most sensitive to heat, so don't put these on the same side of the cabinet as each other.

3) I'd think about someway to create a chimney effect. Get some sort of vent on the bottom part of the cabinent, and a vent at the top with likely the fan blowing out. This should blow the hot air out of the top, and suck the cold air in from the bottom. You'll need to drill some holes in the back of the shelves (or just shorten the shelves so they don't reach all the way to the back of the cabinent to allow for air flow).

It might help if you took some pictures and linked them here for people to look at. Create a photobucket account or something similar if you don't have access to a public site to host pictures.