At our recent CPD accredited evaporative cooling webinar, I received some interesting questions in the Q&A session at the end. I would like to share my answers, which have been edited to make them clearer.

Q: How do you deal with freezing conditions?

A: During colder periods, where freezing outside conditions would be expected, the evaporative coolers would not be used, and they would have been earlier drained down and isolated as part of a winterisation process. This means that there is no chance of any water freezing inside the unit, as it contains no water.

Freezing conditions are then dealt with by carefully mixing quantities of that cooler outside air with warmer waste air from the IT equipment, therefore providing air at desirable conditions.

Data centres are thirsty for electricity, most of it used for maintaining temperature and humidity within the maximum and minimum levels that the servers need to operate properly. This also means that data centres tend to have a big carbon footprint. However, it need not be so: evaporative cooling provides a very cost effective and energy efficient solution to the problem. And, even though it is a water-based system, there are no health risks when it is designed correctly.

The benefits of evaporative cooling in warehouses and industrial buildings are many: it is a highly energy efficient technology, that uses no refrigerants, provides a pleasant indoor climate, is simple and easy to maintain and, last but not least, running costs are four to seven times lower than traditional air conditioning solutions – and they are even lower in data centres.

It is estimated that 1% of the world’s energy is currently used to cool server rooms. And this number is going up fast, as the number of data centres keeps growing, putting increasing pressure on energy supply systems and on the environment because of the consequent rise in CO2 emissions. The ICT industry is responding by moving away from traditional air conditioning systems and looking for environmentally responsible cooling solutions.

Energy efficient and environmentally responsible cooling