By premises
Air conditioning for a server room
One that runs continuously with nobody in the room, sized for the rack's constant heat output rather than for floor area, and backed up — because a server room without cooling reaches a shutdown temperature in minutes, not hours. A domestic split on a normal thermostat is the wrong answer.
Last reviewed
The load is constant and it is known
Unlike every other premises here, a server room's heat output can be calculated exactly: it is essentially the electrical power the equipment draws. Read the rack's consumption and you have the cooling requirement, with no guesswork about occupancy, glazing or doors. This is the one room where sizing is arithmetic rather than judgement.
It runs when nobody is there
A domestic unit expects to be switched on and off. A server room needs cooling at three in the morning on a public holiday, which means a unit rated for continuous duty and a control arrangement that does not depend on someone pressing a button. Many failures we attend are simply a unit that was switched off by whoever left last.
Redundancy, because the failure is expensive
A single unit means one failure stops cooling entirely, and equipment reaches shutdown temperature quickly in a small sealed room. Two smaller units alternating gives redundancy and lets each run at a gentler duty. For anything the business genuinely depends on, that is cheaper than the downtime it prevents.
Cooling without power is not cooling
A UPS that keeps the servers running through an outage while the cooling stops has bought you minutes of rising temperature, not continuity. Either the cooling is on backup too, or the shutdown policy has to account for a room that heats fast. Deciding this in advance is far better than discovering it during the first long cut.
What kind of AC does a server room need?
Can I use an ordinary split AC for a server room?
For a small rack, a split unit rated for continuous operation and left permanently on can work, and plenty do. What makes it inadequate is relying on a unit designed for intermittent domestic duty, or one that resets to off after a power cut. Check the restart behaviour after an outage — that is where most of them fail.
What temperature should a server room be?
Follow the equipment manufacturer's stated operating range rather than a comfort setting; modern equipment tolerates warmer than most people assume, and over-cooling wastes money. What matters more than the exact figure is stability and that the room never approaches the top of that range during a summer afternoon.
What happens if cooling fails while the servers run?
A small sealed room with a rack in it heats quickly — the timescale is minutes rather than hours, and equipment then throttles or shuts down to protect itself. This is why a temperature alarm that reaches somebody is worth more than almost any other single addition to a server room.
Rather have it done?
An annual maintenance arrangement covers scheduled services before and after the season, priority callout when something fails in July, and a record of each unit's measurements over time. Cover starts at PKR 8,000 per unit per year and is aimed at premises where a failed unit costs trading, not comfort.
Annual AC maintenance contracts in Islamabad — prices and scope