As soon as November approaches I start hearing this question more and more. Someone will come in from the outside and walk into the datacenter and immediately say, “It feels warm in here, is something wrong?”
The answer is NO, nothing is wrong.
When you drive home from work, and get of your car and walk 10 yards to your front door (in 30 degree F weather), as soon as you get inside, the first thing that probably goes through your head is… “Ahh… Its nice and warm inside”. And that is with your house thermostate set to 70 degrees F.
A good datacenter will hold a solid 72 degrees 35% relative humidity year round. So yes, in the winter months, when you come in from the outside cold (30-40 degrees F) and walk into a 72 degree F room that happens to be a datacenter you should feel warm. But warm is a relative sensation by our bodies. When its 80 degrees F outside and you walk into the same datacenter, the first thing you say is… “Ahh… Its nice and cold in here”.
The datacenter is always 72 degrees F but in the winter that feels comfortably warm to our bodies after we were just exposed to 35 degree F outside temperatures. So relax, its not “warm” in the datacenter.
Tags: heat, temperature, warm
We find this sensation all the time. One of the advantages of working in a data centre in the summer is that is often the coolest place in the office. Sometimes in the winter this can feel really cold, but I think we acclimatise too quickly to the nice warm office environment so when we go from one room to another you notice the cooler environment immediately. The reality is that the temperature will be roughly the same throughout the year, it’s not the air conditioning playing up more than our body system.