A succession of extreme heatwaves in Europe this year and it’s only going to get worse.
Most days, the room in which I keep all my IT kit reaches 30C plus (about 86F). Last week my router became very erratic, yesterday it was the mini PC running HA.
So what strategies are you using to keep HA cool (apart from the obvious - air conditioning)? A notebook fan (very cheap on Ebay) under the router worked a treat. Apart from that I’ve unstacked everything and put it all on wire racks to let the air circulate.
Without it the case is just a little too hot to touch for more than a second. With it it feels barely above room temp. Pain usually starts around 45C so I suspect its lowering temp 10-12 degrees on the outside but possibly much more on inside components. Its a heat sink from old desktop CPU.
I also turn off the 5.8ghz wifi on my downstairs router overnight. The yellow trace. I tend to leave 5.8ghz off on the upstairs same type router . The orange trace. The blue trace is a third router that boasts a big heat sink.
As has already been touched on, I think the key thing here is that passive cooling isn’t going to cut it, particularly if your home IT equipment is in a cupboard, cabinet, whatever with no air circulation.
Don’t stack components on top of each other if you can, put them on racks/shelves or put spacers in between. If the gear is in a closed cupboard or cabinet it’s going to need ventilation, louvres and preferably a fan to pull air through.
Most computer equipment will happily operate up to about 35-40degC, so don’t stress about it too much. I’m a datacentre manager and read the datasheets for our kit; we only have the aircon set so low in our DCs for the humans, not the equipment
