Home office is HOT!

[Ishouldbwriting]

After two years of working from home, we have turned my home office into a computer room, with my gaming machine, NUC, router, modem, Pi-Hole, work laptop and about five monitors. As you might guess, the room gets pretty hot. On average it's about 5-10 degrees (F) warmer than the rest of the house. If I set the thermostat for my room, the rest of the house is freezing! Something my wife and kids aren't cool with (dad joke, sorry).

 

I have been opening the window, setting up a fan in the doorway to blow some of the heat out, and even have considered putting a portable air conditioner in the room (if the breaker could handle it). I have looked around for some other cooling solutions and thought this group might have some ideas.

 

Also, my room floats around 79F, is that bad for my gaming rig if I am playing something needs high performance.

 

I am someone who watches LTT all the time, but I'm not really up on all the details of what they cover. I'm learning and playing.

 

Any thoughts or ideas?

[minibois]

Your PC uses power and basically all that power is converted into heat which is expelled into the room, which means a better cooler in the PC wouldn't the situation any better.

And also 79F (26C) is not something your PC will be bothered by. Usually the temperature of components in reviews is measured by the difference in temperature between the part and the room, so if your room is warmer the PC just gets warmer.

 

The only way I foresee you can make this situation better is by removing the PC from the room. Sometimes this is done 'crudely', by just putting it in a room on the other side of the wall from your room and then just running the cables through that wall, or it is done through a more complicated setup involving a dock (like a thunderbolt dock, which Linus uses, detailed somewhat in his personal rig update 2015 series of videos, mostly in part 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NshXgisNly4). For various reasons, the dock implementation is much more complicated.

 

So in short, really the only way to remove heat from the room, is by removing its source. You can't feasible move your laptop out of your way and the other mentioned devices (PiHole, router, NUC) aren't that power hungry (AKA warm running), so your best bet is to move the PC some place else.

 

[LWM723]

Use the fan to blow the heat out the window or pull cold air in.

[emosun]

Run a window ac unit.

 

If the air in the room isnt cold then you need to make it cold. Theres not really another magic solution that makes cold air appear from nowhere except an ac.

[Jumballi]

Someone already suggested the “put PC’s in another room”. But there are some other options as well.

 

1. Run PCs at a lower speed, less power means less heat. I literally lowered my room temps by dropping the brightness and refresh rate of my PC.

 

2. Quarantine off PCs into corner close them off to the room. Obviously this is not optimal for your high powered devices and will reduce their lifespan, some devices can’t produce enough heat that they should be fine.

If you seal off your PC, make sure it can get fresh air. A lot of server rooms have direct access to the central air/hvac system.

[Jumballi]

I forgot to mention, don’t run a portable or indoor AC, they produce more heat except for the area right in from of the cold exhaust.

[aisle9]

23 minutes ago, Ishouldbwriting said:

After two years of working from home, we have turned my home office into a computer room, with my gaming machine, NUC, router, modem, Pi-Hole, work laptop and about five monitors. As you might guess, the room gets pretty hot. On average it's about 5-10 degrees (F) warmer than the rest of the house. If I set the thermostat for my room, the rest of the house is freezing! Something my wife and kids aren't cool with (dad joke, sorry).

 

I have been opening the window, setting up a fan in the doorway to blow some of the heat out, and even have considered putting a portable air conditioner in the room (if the breaker could handle it). I have looked around for some other cooling solutions and thought this group might have some ideas.

 

Also, my room floats around 79F, is that bad for my gaming rig if I am playing something needs high performance.

 

I am someone who watches LTT all the time, but I'm not really up on all the details of what they cover. I'm learning and playing.

 

Any thoughts or ideas?

First up, back when I was mining, my rig kept the temperature of my home office around 80F at all times. Nothing died from the heat. 79F ambient isn't going to kill anything. Hell, Bryan from Tech Yes City regularly has his PC in an ambient temp climbing into the upper 80s. I don't know how he survives in that environment, but his PC seems to be fine.

 

Second, there are a few options, but most of them suck:

• If you live in a dry area, a portable, "personal air conditioner" might work. They're actually just little swamp coolers and have zero effect in a humid environment, but if it's otherwise dry in ambient conditions, those can shave a few degrees off and are small enough to sit right in front of you on a desk--assuming they won't be blowing water into PCs or anything.
• If you have wireless peripherals and a way to either run monitor cables or transmit video wirelessly across the room, you could try putting your PC directly underneath the warm air return vent and use the tower fans to direct exhaust air directly up towards it as much as possible. May or may not much of an effect, but worth trying. Important note: be sure you're not placing the PC directly on top of an A/C exhaust. If you do that, your PC will get some lovely cold air flowing through it, and it will happily warm up that air before pumping it out into the room.
• Set your PC up in such a way that it's directing its exhaust out a window. I think this one's probably more trouble than it's worth.
• Move the PC into a different room and run cables through the wall.
• Close and seal off the central vents into the room and install a window AC.

The first one is the easiest, and if you live in a dry area and are ok with 75-76F, that's probably your best bet. If you want the best possible solution and you want the room cold, the window AC is the way to go. You could try underclocking the PC as well. When I first started mining, I was an idiot running my GPUs at full power all the time, and my office was always 83-ish F. Once I wised up and underclocked everything, it came down by a few degrees. Could help in your situation if you're running hardware that can reasonably be underclocked enough to make a difference.

[Ishouldbwriting]

11 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

First up, back when I was mining, my rig kept the temperature of my home office around 80F at all times. Nothing died from the heat. 79F ambient isn't going to kill anything. Hell, Bryan from Tech Yes City regularly has his PC in an ambient temp climbing into the upper 80s. I don't know how he survives in that environment, but his PC seems to be fine.

 

Second, there are a few options, but most of them suck:

• If you live in a dry area, a portable, "personal air conditioner" might work. They're actually just little swamp coolers and have zero effect in a humid environment, but if it's otherwise dry in ambient conditions, those can shave a few degrees off and are small enough to sit right in front of you on a desk--assuming they won't be blowing water into PCs or anything.
• If you have wireless peripherals and a way to either run monitor cables or transmit video wirelessly across the room, you could try putting your PC directly underneath the warm air return vent and use the tower fans to direct exhaust air directly up towards it as much as possible. May or may not much of an effect, but worth trying. Important note: be sure you're not placing the PC directly on top of an A/C exhaust. If you do that, your PC will get some lovely cold air flowing through it, and it will happily warm up that air before pumping it out into the room.
• Set your PC up in such a way that it's directing its exhaust out a window. I think this one's probably more trouble than it's worth.
• Move the PC into a different room and run cables through the wall.
• Close and seal off the central vents into the room and install a window AC.

The first one is the easiest, and if you live in a dry area and are ok with 75-76F, that's probably your best bet. If you want the best possible solution and you want the room cold, the window AC is the way to go. You could try underclocking the PC as well. When I first started mining, I was an idiot running my GPUs at full power all the time, and my office was always 83-ish F. Once I wised up and underclocked everything, it came down by a few degrees. Could help in your situation if you're running hardware that can reasonably be underclocked enough to make a difference.

This is very helpful. I am getting older and don't mind the warmer room, but I was concerned I was going to fry my gaming machine. This makes me feel better. Thank you!

 

I have considered many of the solutions that have been proposed, so it looks like if I want to lower the ambient temp, I am going to have to break up my "command center" into different rooms. With my work laptop, I could move it (and it's dock and monitors) to a different room to work. The again, I could shut down everything but what I am using at that moment.

 

I didn't know if there was some sort of elegant solution for the heat problem. Doesn't sound like the options are all that great. Appreciate the time and brainwaves!

[aisle9]

39 minutes ago, Ishouldbwriting said:

This is very helpful. I am getting older and don't mind the warmer room, but I was concerned I was going to fry my gaming machine. This makes me feel better. Thank you!

 

I have considered many of the solutions that have been proposed, so it looks like if I want to lower the ambient temp, I am going to have to break up my "command center" into different rooms. With my work laptop, I could move it (and it's dock and monitors) to a different room to work. The again, I could shut down everything but what I am using at that moment.

 

I didn't know if there was some sort of elegant solution for the heat problem. Doesn't sound like the options are all that great. Appreciate the time and brainwaves!

If shutting down everything but what you need at the moment is an option, that's probably your easiest, cheapest and safest bet. The portable air conditioners on Amazon can be had "refurbished" from Amazon Warehouse for as little as $4-5. Yes, that's cheap, Chinese "refurbished" crap, but if it makes you feel any better, those coolers are basically a computer fan that blows through a sponge. Not much there to catch fire, for whatever that's worth lol

 

I'd be curious to hear what you end up going with and how well it works. I'm going to be moving from the upper midwest to Florida over the summer. I don't have nearly as much equipment, but I might end up running most or all of it in one smaller room than I've been running it in up here. I'm interested to see how everything works out for you.

[Ishouldbwriting]

Ended up getting a quiet tower fan, putting it by the air conditioning register and then turning it to low. The air movement in the room seems to be helping, lowering it about 2 degrees F. Thanks for all the suggestions!