I need to tell me roommate that now is not a good time to be mining bitcoin...

 

why's that?

 

The computer is doing an excellent job of converting electricity to heat.

 

I used to do Folding@Home in the winter to heat my room in college. The first apartment I had only had wall heaters, so the computer heat was a little safer.

 

I need to figure out a better air flow solution for the media server.

Currently housed in the hallway closet. The door has about a half inch gap between the bottom of the door and the floor allowing cooler air to enter the closet.

Ive got the back of the server (exhaust side) in the rear corner of the closet. I cut a small hole in the sheet rock and blocked the sides of the server to push the hot air into the wall.

Still has a noticeable temp difference from the floor to ceiling of the closet though. Thought about putting mesh vents or something in the door.

 

Welp when you try googling a different term or sentence, you find more things lol. Looks like this might be a great option for intake

https://www.handymanhowto.com/instal...n-air-pathway/

 

that would work,

 

But how will you vent the hot air out of the top of the closet?

 

*cracks Physics knuckles*

Ideally, we'd go to van der Waals Equation of State which is a modification (read as a more grown-up version) of the Ideal Gas Law we all know and love: "pivnert". vdW EoS accounts for molecular size and inter-molecular interactions wherein IGL assumes all molecules to be point-masses of infinitesimal diameter that always bounce off each other. However, for the purposes of this discussion, we can save some time and some pedantry by just not using a hydraulic pile driver when merely a rock hammer were needed.

Ideal Gas Law: the product of the average absolute pressure (P) and the finite volume (V) of a fluid proportional to the average energy or absolute average temperature (T) of the fluid, or P*V = a*T, where a = number of molecules (N) times Boltzmann constant (k) divided by Avagadro's number (N_A). Cocktail party treatment: pressure times volume is proportional to temperature.

Heat is being introduced into the system (closet) by free electrons colliding and rubbing together as they pass through the circuitry of the server--temperature increases. Assuming the volume of our system to be constant, this means that the pressure within our system is increasing. In order to decrease the temperature within our system (since nothing can be done about the volume except opening the door) we need to decrease the pressure. Adding an opening/vent to the bottom of the door is a start, but there is a slight complication to this approach: hot air rises, cold air descends. Additionally, hot air, by definition, is more energetic than cold air which also means, by definition, it is moves more than cold air.

I'm sure, at one point in our lives, we've had someone yell at us, "Close the door! You're letting the cold air out!" This is a thermodynamically flawed statement. Fluids, and matter in general, will always go from higher energy to lower energy unless external energy is applied (A/C fan is running). Since the air inside the closet is warmer than outside, the hotter air will want to escape the system. You'd be better served improving the efficiency of removing the hot air than introducing cooler air.

 

Chris beat me to it while I was typing my response.

 

It vents out INTO the wall, like literally lol.

Ill try to draw something quick/simple up in paint.

But the closet shares a wall with the heater unit in the closet next to it. Between the inner sheet rock of both closets, there is a couple inch gap of just air. So Ive boxed in the rear of the server so the hot exhaust air has no where to go but IN the wall.

 

The last sentence of my previous post still holds: You'd be better served improving the efficiency of removing the hot air than introducing cooler air--not into the wall, but out of the closet.

I'm guessing the air in the wall is hot or, at the very least, warm. If you have warm air from the heater space and warm air from the closet joining the warm air in the wall, unless the temperature gradient is decreasing going into the wall, you won't get the flow you're hoping for especially once those three spaces reach thermal equilibrium.

 

Think about heat sinks and fans on computers: they're not blowing cool air into the computer, they're blowing hot air away from it.

 

The air in the wall (between the two closets) is much cooler than the exhaust air from the server.

 

You still have to give that air someplace to go. Simply pressurizing the wall isn't going to vent that hot air.