Equipment Room Cooling

Fan-tech makes a line of almost silent in-line duct fans but they only push air one direction and run off line voltage so you can use an attic fan line voltage thermostat($20ish) to control. Intended for bathrooms and kitchens.

Maybe you can switch the orientation of the fan depending on the season. However most exterior vents have a gravity/spring loaded louver system to prevent back drafts. That would make reversing the flow difficult.

You could also make a box that had a bathroom exhaust fan connected to the duct.

I am interested in something like this also. Let me know what you come up with.

I had one of these installed for my projector:

http://www.pricegrabber.com/user_sal...&mode=googleff

Brian

How bout 2 fans? Both going into the same duct via a t-joint. 1 blows out, 1 blows in. Bathroom fans are cheap. If your room seals shut you shouldnt have any issues with noise.

What I did, if your equipt room shares a wall with another room that is not the theater, is I put a fan that blows air out of the equiptment closet into adjoining room up near the ceiling. At the bottom there is a vent where it can draw cool air in from the same room. My floor plan allowed me to do this without it being noticable in the other room.

Good luck.

If you are going to have an exhaust fan (whether it is on a thermostat or not) you must provide a source of air INTO the room otherwise it will not work effectively. The source could simply be the space under the door like you would find in a bathroom but most folks try to seal up their rooms so the space under the door won't work. How about just putting in a vent into another room like in my case, I'm going to put a vent into the basement, which is always cooler than the rest of the house. I plan on building a muffler of sorts using insulated duct board and making the air travel through a series of 90deg bends within the duct. This would allow some air to natually convect out of the room when the fan is not running and would allow "fresh" air into the room when the fan is running. Just my 2 cents. Best of luck. Bud

So, how much air needs to be moved, and how cool does the room need to be? I think that answer will help to inform the situation. To me this is a tricky problem if passive cooling is insufficient. Here's why:

At some point you have to trade air between some other volume of air and the air of your equipment room - the outside, or your theater. The problem with the outside is that the temp varies, and you're opening up to the outside.

Assuming you integrate the equipment room with your HVAC, is it better to add cool air to that space (supply), or remove hot air (return), or both? The problem here is controlling when this happens, so the easiest is probably to keep the equipment room the same temp as the theater.

I have a similar scenario with a slightly larger equipment room (8' x 3' x 14').

The difference for me is there is no means of exhaust outside the room - I can vent into the theater room near the HVAC return, into the ceiling joists, or into the space between the walls, and if this would work, I would simply dump hot air periodically with a temp-controlled computer fan.

My theater is a "room within a room", so it provides for some circulation of air (dricore floor, space in walls, space in ceiling joists). Also, the equipment room does not need to be all that cool, just cool enough so that nothing overheats.

My main motivation for putting the equipment in a separate room is to provide easy access to the equipment and some noise isolation, and there's not another space outisde of the room to provide for this. This is turning out to be more tricky than I thought.

Kelly