30 January 2014

Warwick Council’s Centenary House building features four roof-mounted CRECs which are said to deliver 90kW of cooling and provide N+1 redundancy.

Warwickshire County Council has completed its fourth data centre using EcoCooling’s computer room evaporative cooler (CREC) system.

Its Centenary House facility in Nuneaton features four roof-mounted CRECs which are said to deliver 90kW of cooling and provide N+1 redundancy.

EcoCooling says hot and cold aisle containment is used with a raised access  floor to enable 9m³ of air per second to be fed into the cold aisle. Low energy electrically commutate fans are also used to provide extraction. There is no refrigeration backup to the system.

The vendor adds that its control system provides a variety of operations dependent upon the outside temperature. A PLC (Programmable Logical Controller) is used to control all parameters including group control of CRECs, fan speed, damper positions and links to fire systems. The system also monitors performance, while an Ethernet protocol TCP modbus facility integrates with a Trend BMS system for data and fault reporting.

According to EcoCooling, evaporative cooling is a low energy, low carbon alternative to air conditioning, and uses a simple method of cooling air without refrigerants. The patented system features wetted filter pads and air is cooled when the water evaporates.

The firm says its CRECs are suitable for server rooms from 10kW to 5MW and for both retrofit and new builds. It also claims that a return on investment in under a year is achievable in many cases.

By deploying CRECs, EcoCooling says that customers can benefit from energy savings of more that 95 per cent compared to traditional refrigeration systems, and their facilities can also achieve PUEs of less than 1.1.

The company adds that its ultimate aim is to slash the UK’s total energy demand by one per cent – the equivalent of shutting down an entire power station.