The importance of monitoring airflow in the office
In a previous blog, Mike mentioned the importance of monitoring the airflow in your data center, but recently we were reminded of just how important airflow is in the work environment. Normally, our office is quite chilly. However, yesterday, the employees of Ravica were treated to nice a nice toasty office to work in. It was certainly a welcome change.
The reason for our cubicles being so nice and warm was because the air conditioning (which is normally blasting non-stop) was not turning on. After several hours, the nice toasty office become a stagnant bog of stale air. Breathing nothing but other people’s CO2 was getting my coworkers and I very sluggish and lethargic – not to mention hot and sweaty.
Luckily, we had a couple of airflow sensors placed in front of the air conditioning vents. As I mentioned, the air conditioning in our work area is typically blowing all day, and quite hard, so to have it shut off for a while and let the office temperature rise a bit, is actually a good thing. However, we can now see that if it does not start back up in a reasonable time frame, things can go too far in the other direction.
To alleviate the issue of getting email alerts from the airflow sensor every time the air conditioning unit shut off, we tweaked the “Continuous time to report” field, under that sensor’s setup screen. Now we can occasionally get a reprieve from our normally frigid conditions, but if the air conditioner stays off for more than a couple of hours, the building manager and our office manager get an email alert. Of course, since we have the airflow sensor connected to a SecurityProbe, we can use escalated notifications. So if for any reason the building manager does not acknowledge the alert within an hour, then he gets a text message sent directly to his phone.
So it is certainly important to keep your expensive data room equipment from overheating, but it is just as important to keep your employees from overheating as well.
~ Jon Mills
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