Exhaust / ventilation for technical room

Horrido,

I am currently thinking about my technical room or rather the location of my 19" rack. It is not a classic technical room with heating, etc., but a roughly 1.5m² "room within a room," in which only a 42 U 19" cabinet will be placed. It will house the building control system, multiroom amplifiers, crossbars for audio and video, NAS, AVRs, network technology, and so on. The cabinet is quite full, but I have not yet carried out a somewhat accurate heat dissipation calculation.

This is all happening in my study, meaning I want to build two drywall walls perpendicular to an exterior wall to create a niche 1 meter wide and 1.5 meters deep. According to the current plan, there is a glass door to the study, as I would like to see the technology. The wall projections that form the side walls of the "room" stand freely in the room. It looks roughly like in the pictures attached. Of course, you could also place the rack freely in the room, but I don’t want to see the supplied cables and want to keep things as quiet as possible.

Now the question: What is the smartest way to get the warm air out? Wall fan blowing air into the study? Use the intake of the controlled ventilation system and pull the air through the controlled ventilation system? The supply air for the room will come through a low-level grille either in the door or in the side walls. There are no high-performance servers running in the rack that produce hundreds of watts of heat, but it cannot be completely sealed.

What is in the room above? An attic by any chance? Then you could nicely direct the air upwards. With what you want to put in the rack, a lot of exhaust air is generated. If it just ends up in your room, you will never have good air there – or you will always have the window open.

There is basically nothing above since the study will be in an extension with a flat roof. However, a direct exhaust to the outside seems unfavorable to me with a tight building envelope in connection with the controlled residential ventilation. It then behaves similarly to an exhaust hood in the kitchen, I think.

I would try to use the waste heat in winter - when I look at what crazy heat our HiFi cabinet in the living room produces, and there is only 1 PC, a NAS, receiver, DVD, Fritzbox and small stuff inside...

You surely have a heat exchanger in the [Kontrollierte-Wohnraumlüftung], right? Then I would run it over there if it can be done without much effort.

Controlled residential ventilation with a heat exchanger is coming for sure. Today's Google Day also showed that it will probably be done via controlled residential ventilation. In an emergency, there's always a hole in the exterior wall if that's not enough.

Solve via the controlled residential ventilation. Best with supply and exhaust air twice. Then you can also seal the area well so that there is little noise emission.