Homelab

By keeping your house at 25 degrees, you're setting the baseline temperature of the house (i.e. it will never be colder than 25 degrees, period).

If you can get some airflow, why not just set your house to like 19 degrees, and use the fans of your unit to equalize the temperature in your unit (19 degrees is the new baseline, it will probably keep the unit a degree or two hotter just by the ambient heat generated by your server).

For what it's worth a server is fine to run in this type of environment. What are the internal temperatures of your system? Is it overheating?

I vent to the attic using a duct fan.

Hard drives produce a lot of heat. Switches can produce a lot of heat, particularly older switches (and routers).

But, yes, temperature is your enemy.

I don't generate the heat in the first place. 35 celsius is comfy for servers, though.

When I had a rack at home, it was a silent one (so almost completely sealed). I had a fat duct coming in from the outside into the bottom of the rack and another fat duct taking the hot air from the top outside. But in winter, I made sure it was blowing that hot air into the living space.

Heavy computation rack is in an unheated conservatory with a window cracked open. Keeps the HDD temperatures around 30 degrees. Temperature monitoring from my PDU shows a 3'C rise from the inlet to the exhaust side of the rack. This stuff is mostly powered off when not in use. In summer, it can get to 35'C in that room so I shut everything down at that point.

24/7 rack is in my lounge and vents the heat into the room (helps a little bit with heating costs). Top of the rack is about 37'C but I've seen it around 45'C with all my hypervisors doing stuff. Nothing complains. As long as the intake air is within the manufacturer's stated range, it's fine.

Might want to consider redirecting the heat into the house rather than venting it outside.

I don't really have any input on your question, but I have one of my own.

25°?? Is that a typical indoor temperature for houses in Norway? I'm in Canada and my house sits around 19° most of the year, as do most people I know.

Grow tents bro.

Living in The Netherlands - and although Gulf Stream and such make it much more timid/neutral than Norway, literally every home here has "mechanical ventilation" - for example https://www.ithodaalderop.nl/nl-NL/consument/product/03-00398

And at least for about a decade or so - "Heat Recovery" types of ventilation were already a thing - say https://www.ithodaalderop.nl/nl-NL/consument/product/03-00407

In your case it might be more effective to set this "Heat Recovery" in a way where it's heat from your server room used as "OUT" and then other places (say living room, kitchen, hallways) are "IN".

What are you running hardware wise? X5690 (aka something old, power hungry, hot, and not very efficient)?

I disagree that 30C is just peachy, but I suppose for home use it’s fine. But if your house is at 25C and room raise to 30C isn’t that much… depending on what you’re running and average utilization.

You’ll have to provide cool air to the room as well. No amount of extraction will help if you don’t do that.

In the summer, I'm dumping it outside.

In the winter, I'm heating my garage with it.

Has worked great for many years now.

You'll need inlet and outlet, not just outlet. Also, look at your server power usage too, drive don't generate newrly a much heat.

What's the power output of all your hardware?

Ignoring it. My lab is in the garage. It gets hot here in the summer, but not incredibly hot. And if heat shortens the life of my hardware, it’s all cheap; I’ll just buy a cheap replacement.

Close off the vent in the server room and open the door from the server room and your house. Free heating

I cut my office off from the house HVAC during the winter and use my rack to heat it.

I cry mostly.... But over 30c is getting a bit toasty. With an AC unit I struggle to keep my server room under 27 but I have a lot more hardware.

In the winter I vent the heat into my basements drop ceiling in the summer months through a vent outside

You could use an air-to-air heat exchanger instead of the vent to cool the room and not add humidity.

I have 4 zone heating in my house.

The basement, where the server is, and sunroom are connected by a door I leave open. The server keeps it all at about 16 degrees with no heating on in those zones when its -4 degrees outside. I love it because I can pretend its free heating.

You need cool air in, warm air out.

If it’s just warm air out, you have to wonder what temp the air surrounding the servers is like, and how it effects the server’s heat.

I live in Australia.

I pump all the heat out of my server room to the outdoors.

In doing this I am assisting cooling the planet by pumping my low temperature servers heat into the environment and reducing the overall global temperature increase.

As a fellow Norwegian ive always just vented the air into the living area (with a sound trap after fan).

A few places ive lived this has been all my heating all year.

Your hardware is fine. They can operate at temperatures that can kill a human. When I worked in DR I we used to get dead lieberts about 2 or e times a year.

If your pumping hot air out, the air coming in is from the rest of your house (25 degrees)

You need better circulation