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It could be a silly question, but I decided to go for it.

I shall be buying 3 servers in the next few weeks to set up a small webfarm at my home.

I am told by different people who work in server rooms, that I should keep my servers in an air conditioned room. Which is really expensive, because the temperature here in south asia is between 10 to 50 degrees C.

Here comes the funny part: I have an extra fridge in my home, why shouldn't I put the servers inside that fridge?

Benefits:

  1. I don't have to buy the air conditioner.
  2. I don't have to buy the rack mount for the servers.
  3. The electricity consumed by the fridge is much much less than AC.

Give me your suggestions!

Jeff Atwood
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    A fridge won't be effective - it can't shift several hundred watts of heat from the servers even if its compressor is running continuously. – Paul R Jan 09 '11 at 18:33
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    oh wait. Don't down-vote. It's interesting. –  Jan 09 '11 at 18:46
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    Reading your replies to the answers you have already, it sounds like you've already decided to do it and just want to be told its a good idea. *It's not*. Daniel, Julian and Paul R are all correct. A fridge is not very efficient at cooling something that is continually generating heat (in fact the heat generated by a typical server is likely to exceed the cooling abilities of an average fridge, it's likely to add humidity which will be bad for the servers (and dangerous for you, water and electricity are a bad mixture). – Rob Moir Jan 09 '11 at 19:33
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    I think you misunderstand the fundamentals of how a fridge works. It doesn't add cold air to the compartment, it removes hot air, which cools the average temperature of the compartment. Even adding a hot plate of food can raise the temperature by a few degrees before it cools off, nevermind adding three servers constantly generating many times more heat. You might want to read this: http://home.howstuffworks.com/refrigerator.htm – MDMarra Jan 09 '11 at 19:52
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    @MarkM This is very basic thermodynamics. Fridge and Air-conditioner work on same principal. Ideally, you can create a closed Air-Conditioned chamber by modifying an fridge. see http://www.green-energy-efficient-homes.com/how-air-conditioning-works.html. You will need to add a dehumidifier if you're worried about humidity control. You can very well design an thermocol insulated chamber that maintains lower temperature. The bigger the fridge you have, the more cooling effect you will have in your modified AC. – Nishant Jan 09 '11 at 21:22
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    This question is closed. But I would like to clear few things. (1) Fridge and AC work on exact same principal. The coolant takes heat from closed system from evaporator. And throws out from condenser. (2) This is a reversible heat-engine. So, work done by the compressor in maintaining the temp diff would be same for AC or Fridge. Adding a heated metal place will have exact same effect in both the cases. (3) Water deposition via condensation is equally likely in AC if environment is humid. But it's easy to create a closed system with no humidity using hygroscope and blower -- dehumidifier. – Nishant Jan 09 '11 at 21:45
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    I'd say impossible is very often untested. With careful study of thermodynamics and heat balance. You can create a mini-server room. Just for three of your servers. Muhammad Jamal is clearly up-to experiment. – Nishant Jan 09 '11 at 21:49
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    This topic is epic, favorited >_ – Kedare Jan 10 '11 at 00:52
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    This is _so_ relevant! Somebody vote it back! – Andres Jaan Tack Jan 10 '11 at 08:02
  • @Andres Of course it is not the way, but clearly deserves thinking on why NOT. I don't understand the closing – Dr. belisarius Jan 10 '11 at 14:00
  • I would be nice if people with less rep could vote down "the closing" of a question, because it is pretty clear by all the comments that many members of the community don't think this question should have been closed. – delux247 Jan 10 '11 at 14:30
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    @Delux, @Belisarius, @Andres, @Everyone who wants this question re-opened, please tell me how it fits into this site as defined [in the FAQ](http://serverfault.com/faq): **[Server Fault] is not about... Networking outside the professional workplace** - no professional would ever, ever do this in a million years, and the op specifically states it's for at home. – Mark Henderson Jan 10 '11 at 20:28
  • @Mark, now all we need is more delete votes so we can get rid of this one and get back to proper professional sysadmin stuff. – John Gardeniers Feb 16 '11 at 23:29
  • @John - I have a master delete vote, but I need to be careful about brandying it about. Someone might lose an eye. – Mark Henderson Feb 16 '11 at 23:43
  • @Mark, fully understood and I wasn't dropping any hints in that regard. – John Gardeniers Feb 17 '11 at 01:05
  • @Mark you should know by now, being a mod, that using more than one @user in your comments isn't useful as only the first user gets notified. I could have opened a case for defending the status of the question if your message would get to me on time. – Dr. belisarius Feb 19 '11 at 05:01
  • @Belisarius - ok, a few things: 1) I was not a mod when this question was closed. Neither was sysadmin1138. It was closed 100% by community vote. 2) I posted the names in no particular order. Would you have preferred me to post an individual comment for each person, just changing the @salutation? 3) I was not concerned with actually notifying each person individually, it was just more of a "collective" (hence the @everyone). All that said, if you think it should be re-opened, feel free to ask on Meta, and cast a re-open vote. – Mark Henderson Feb 19 '11 at 09:44
  • Servers are not as picky about their environment as you might think. I think most server rooms are overcooled. Servers also do just fine outdoors: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/en/story/60074/hiit-study-servers-run-well-around-zero-degrees – jkj Jun 23 '11 at 17:00
  • Regardless of the technical issue, the StackExchange community have never failed to entertain me, I truly love you guys. – amrx Oct 10 '16 at 07:26

8 Answers8

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Because opening the fridge would add a lot of humid air to the environment, that condenses on the cold server parts, builds up drops, and destroys your servers.

Someone else tried it with a freezer:

alt text

Just kidding, this was intended by some encryption breakers, but it fitted too good in this question *g

Daniel
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    I just went to the fridge , i touched all metalic things , i see no sign of water. –  Jan 09 '11 at 18:52
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    @Muhammed - just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. Take a look at your freezer - how much frost do you see around the edges? That's a result of the humidity in the freezer that's come in from the outside world. That same humidity doesn't automagically avoid going into your fridge too. My fridge has small amounts of frost in it (so you could say, write your name on a piece of glass). That's humidity. Humidity = water, water = death. – Mark Henderson Jan 09 '11 at 19:27
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    This clearly makes it a water-cooled server farm! – Troy Hunt Jan 10 '11 at 07:53
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    It's possible that Muhammad's servers are in an arid climate. In that case, condensation is not an issue. What is an issue is that an ordinary fridge could never keep up with the heat generation of even a modest server. And in a closed fridge it would get very hot very quickly. – Apocalisp Jan 11 '11 at 05:07
  • @Acopalisp - the user states they're in south asia. That's the tropics where 100% humidity is fairly common. – Mark Henderson Feb 16 '11 at 23:45
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Three servers? You do not need any special cooling for just three servers.

A/C controller server rooms are for hundreds of servers, not three. Just as long as you keep them out of direct sunlight, you'll be fine.

I live in Australia where the amient temperature can get up to 40 celcius easilly on a summers day - you'll be fine with just three servers.

Additionally, most rack mounted servers I know are 80cm deep. Unless your fridge is freakishly deep, you won't fit them anyway.

Mark Henderson
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    3 servers... just get a decent fan and point it at the servers. Or better yet... use slicehost or linode. – delux247 Jan 10 '11 at 14:32
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Here you may read a thread about a real experiment (with a deep freezer and a little fridge). The conclusions in short are:

It's now time to remove the PC and end this experiment. Here are the results.

A fridge doesn't seem to have enough power to sustain a cold environment for computers. In fact the stress placed on the fridge lead to other people's fridges breaking down, however I think it's safe to say that it wouldn't happen in 15 minutes like people say. In short, fridges are best at cooling drinks not PCs. Hard drives don't seem to like the cold (or at least the ones I used didn't) and their life span wil be lowered considerably, so I recommend you leave hard drives outside the unit.

The deep freezer seems to show suprising results that even I was skeptical of, cooling the PC a reasonable amount. However like all cooling systems, and especially closed environment ones like this, condensation was a big issue.

To wrap it up, if you have an old deep freezer that you don't mind putting a few holes through, and a PC that you don't mind taking chances with -- then this is a somewhat sound idea. But there are much cheaper ways that work better if you need to have new machinery. As the Mythbusters would say: as far as their ability to cool computers goes, "busted" for the fridge and "plausible" for the freezer.

Jeff Atwood
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Dr. belisarius
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Just don't do it.

Your server is going to create A LOT more heat than the fridge can cool. If you've ever been in a server room (which in comparison to a fridge is massive) where the air conditioning is playing up, you will know just how hot it gets and how quickly it gets that hot.

Your server will most likely do an emergency thermal shutdown within about 10 minutes of being closed in the fridge, and you risk doing serious damage to the internal server components. Don't look at the manufacturer to replace all the failed components on warranty terms either.

Ben Pilbrow
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I would not recommend putting you servers in the fridge for at least two reasons:

  1. You have to drill holes in the fridge to get your electric power into the fridge. ;-) This will lower the isolation.

  2. The amount of watts that a fridge consumes per hour is in the range of 100 Watts. The amount of watts that your servers will be consuming will be at least 450 so you will be heating far more than cooling.

What will happen is that you will actually be locking the servers in a small space without the ability to cool down. Your servers will toast.

Skyhawk
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  • no driller holes is free , and using stuff like plaster seen(which kids use to play) would retight that whole.so no issue with your first point.w.r.t the second point , what i understand is , that the server will be releasing more heat than the fridge will be producing the cooling , the end result would be heating ( since its airtight).right? –  Jan 09 '11 at 19:03
  • @Jamal, I am interested to here how you are planning to overcome my second point? –  Jan 09 '11 at 19:04
  • @Julian, your second point really doesn't have much value. Every cooling system produces more heat then cool air. – Zoredache Jan 09 '11 at 19:36
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    The second point here is wrong, in that a refrigeration system tends to *move* much more energy than its compressor consumes (the ratio of the two being the 'coefficient of performance' or CoP.) But behind that mistake is the truth that a domestic fridge does not have a powerful enough plant to cool several hard-working servers. Domestic fridges also tend to be 'capillary' systems, which are set up for a very narrow range of operating temperatures - so they won't do very well other than at the 4-degrees-ish they're designed for. – Will Dean Jan 10 '11 at 16:12
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I think you want to stick to airconditioning units: they are designed to deal/work with moving air. Fridges and freezers aren't.

DutchUncle
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If you're really up to experimentation. Here is what I suggest.

  1. remove all the racks from the fridge.
  2. Put a slow moving fan at the top of empty fridge facing bottom. (for air circulation)
  3. Bare the evaporator coil and put it under the fan in such a way that air crosses it through.
  4. then place your servers beneath it in such a way that it never blocks complete air circulation.
  5. Drill one hole for power input to servers. And distribute power to servers extending this one input. Make sure you sealed it with good thermal insulation.
  6. Circuit a themostat outside that displays temperature inside. Before you open the fridge, make sure the themostat comes closer to your room temperature to avoid condensation.

Now, you may also want to plug-in a dehumidifier (or a blower that throws hot blows outside) that you run every time you open and then close the fridge and before starting the fridge.

It's a good experiment, at least.

Nishant
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More useful would be opening the case of the servers and having a large fan blowing directly onto the motherboard. You want to avoid hotspots. I used to live in South Florida, and have been in situations where the air conditioning has quit working. Temperatures over 40C were easily reached.

Tangurena
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