In general, rooms that require access flooring need it for cooling purposes, cable management or a combination of the two. But what happens if your cooling needs are exacerbated by environmental circumstances?
During a heatwave or particularly hot summer conditions, raised access flooring is needed more than ever to provide adequate ventilation, allow for the installation of larger cooling systems or enable vital cable management to avoid injuries.
Beyond this, raised access floors can also be affected by the heat themselves, and this should be taken into account when planning your installation.
To find out how to do this, here is how heatwaves can affect your access floor itself, how it can necessitate access flooring in the first place and how you can factor in greater ventilation and heat dissipation needs in your data centre.
How Does A Heatwave Affect Access Floors?
Like other flooring materials, raised access flooring systems tend to expand at higher temperatures, which can affect not only the surface area of the flooring but also its height.
However, much like other flooring materials and installation systems, access floors are designed with a reasonable level of expansion in mind, and in normal weather conditions, you are unlikely to be affected or even notice the changes by sight or feel.
This is usually not a problem, but if there are hotter conditions than were taken into account when installing the floor, it can perhaps cause more issues.
If the metal pedestals expand at different rates, it can create trip hazards which were not there before if the design does not take this into account.
How Can A Heatwave Affect Your Data Centre’s Raised Flooring Needs?
Data centres, server rooms and larger computer laboratories have significant cable management and heat ventilation needs, as computers generate a lot of heat when they are in operation and in close proximity to each other.
Whilst a single computer can typically ventilate itself as long as its fans or cooling system is not blocked, a server mainframe consists of dozens, if not hundreds, of computers working next to each other at the same time, generating huge amounts of heat.
If it is allowed to remain in the room, the computers will simply shut down, but raised access flooring can help by creating a ventilation channel to extract heat and move it away from the server room.
As well as this, access floors improve cable management by providing an easy way to access cables that are out of sight and out of the way of typical operation.
Heatwaves can significantly increase this ventilation need, depending on other cooling systems and the design and location of the server room itself.
