"clean" rack

Hey everyone. Just thought I'd delve into the knowledgebase here to see what I could find out about something I'm thinking about doing. Some background: My wife and I help a local animal rescue group and serve also as a foster family. That means at any given time, we may have an extra dog or cat (or 2 or 3) living in our house amongst our family "herd". That means lots and lots of dust.

Currently, I have a big screen tv flanked with two equipment cabinets in our living room. One is just for stuff and the other houses the HT equipment. (Outlaw 1050, dvd player, vcr (that never gets used) and two Dish Network receivers.) I am CONSTANTLY fighting to keep this stuff clean and losing more ground daily. (As Tim Allen says, "I hate dustin', so I just duct tape the small stuff down and bring my leaf blower in...oh, Oh, OH!!") All of the wires come out the back so it's wide open at the rear and has a glass door on the front. Also since the DSS receivers get pretty hot, I have a clip on fan on the back of the cabinet constantly blowing air across them, so the glass door is usually left cracked open. Needless to say, this setup is a dust magnet.

ANYWAY, there's a closet nearby that I had been toying with the idea of housing the equipment and my number one concern is heat buildup. I could probably run a duct into the closet from below for cooling, but that makes me think that I'll just be adding dust again. (Although much less.) I can use an IR extender for my Pronto remote, so I'm not really worried about that part.

What do you guys do with your equipment if you're hiding it? Oh yeah, and of course, I don't want to have to spend a lot of dough on the solution.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Todd

The closet might be a good idea, but ducting from the house AC system will only work when part of the year - that closet will need cooling year-round, and will not appreciate it when you switch the house over from cooling to heating. Ventilation is your best bet, but if you have such significant dust problems you may want to arrange your equipment rack or closet so that you have a controlled intake point that you can put a filter on. If you moved everything to the closet, you could add a door grille with a filter on the back as the air intake and put a ventilation fan at the top. If there's an attic above, it would be a convenient place to discharge heat to.

Have you measured the air temperature inside the cabinet that you are currently using? It might be possible to make some changes to the rear of the rack to allow the front door to stay closed and keep the air temperature inside the cabinet down to a manageable level and introduce a filter of some sort to help cut down on the dust.

------------------
gonk -- 950 Review | LFM-1 Review | Pre/Pro Comparison Chart | Saloon Links

Check out the 950 feedback, "Stacking the 950" posted by Dannic.
The first reply contains a link to a website that is pretty impressive. I don't have the heat problem, but I wish I did so I could get some of this "cool" gear.

------------------
The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. But what IS the Question?

Thanks for the responses guys. Gonk, the ventilation idea you suggested would probably work well and I could even incorporate the use of some of the products on that Active Thermal Management page.

Currently, the only heat issue I have is with the DSS receivers and I solve that with the fan. I only keep the front glass door open a crack to allow the air to blow over the units and out the crack. I could probably keep the glass door closed, but I don't.

Due to my cable manangement system, or more specifically the lack thereof, the depth of some of my equipment and the depth of the cabinet, I'd have a hard time getting a back on the cabinet at all, so unfortunately, filtering the existing cabinet isn't an option.

Thanks again.

[This message has been edited by kugumby (edited September 20, 2004).]