A Work in Progress...
Been following this thread for awhile, and I finally have my own creation to a point where I think its worth sharing
. This started off as a useless closet at the very center of the house, which was about 4ft wide, but only 13in deep. I forgot to take a picture prior to demolition, but you can tells it was pretty stupid from the outlines in the picture.
I knew with all the gear I planned to cram into a relatively small space, heat would be an issue. This is a large kitchen exhaust fan that pipes the air through the attic, and out the roof. It will empty the air out of a 450sqft romm in 1.5 minutes
The foam board was just to give me a clean starting surface. It also helps seal out dust between the old wall planks, and will help keep noise from traveling through the walls
Structured wiring panels installed (maybe not preferred way, but space was tight). All the punch-out's on the left side feed into the rack closet 6" to the left
These panels will eventualy be covered by custom cabinet doors, so that they appear to be a built-in. The space to the far right will be a small counter top with storage above and below. You may not be able to see it, but the space goes back to the right an additional 13". The room this is located in will eventually be my new media room/small home theater
you can see that "dead space" a little better in this one. I'm going to get a custom granite counter top cut that extends back there. Should be enough space to tuck a coffee pot sized device out of the way. I'll do some kind of shelves above to maximize the limited space
Door on the left goes to the staircase landing, the door on the right hides the server rack. The panels are a mess at this point, as I had to quickly move everything over to keep the project moving. The bottom boxes are reserved for intercom, WHA drops, and an OMNI Pro.
Checking the final clearance of the slide out rack. If I had taken the picture from a higher vantage point, you would see it clears the top of the door frame by a meager 1/4"
Testing the slide function of the Royal Rack. It also turns 90 degrees fro access to the back of the equipment. This was the original plan, but as you will see in later pictures, I ended up adding a smaller door to the rear of the closet. I will only use the sliding base for major overhauls of the system now. I needed to use the sliding base instead of the casters option anyway to get the rack to a height lower than a door original to the house. You can see behind the rack that I installed filter grates to clean the air going into the closet. There is 1 one each side of the wall, each with a high-quality filter to slow down dust accumulation (recall the giant fan mentioned above lol)
The knockouts on the left of the wiring panels feed straight through the wall into the closet. Super easy to route wiring
. That's 2 dedicated 20 amp circuits for the rack, and 2 15 amp circuits not shown. That metal bar is just some leftover shelf bracket that made for a good wire management solution.
This picture is from the staircase landing. I added an original, small closet door to the back of the closet for easier access to the back of the equipment. I installed a 1.5" PVC conduit through the wall from the top right media panel for the router. The router is dead center vertically and horizontally in the house
This is basically where i'm at right now, although I installed the stop strips and weather stripping around this door before posting this picture.
This is an older picture, but I'm proud that I managed to fit a KVM into an 18" deep rack
Here's a higher res of the rear rack