Unconditioned Texas Garage Lab – 1 year later

If you aren't using all the ports on the switch, you aren't really exercising the switch much. That a 48 port witch with ~10% of the ports in use doesn't overheat and isn't even spinning its fans at max when in a garage in Texas in the summer isn't really surprising. It isn't surprising in the same way that a modern desktop or notebook system in the same environment not overheating in if all you de is power it on and let it idle is is not surprising.

Start using a significant portion of the switching backplane capacity and see how well it does then though. That would be a much more interesting result, whether the device succeeds or fails.

This is unsurprising to me, but that is because I did a few years in Afghanistan servicing edge compute and communications stacks. About half of the hundred or so different sites I was responsible for had zero air conditioning. Dust was a major issue, every unit rotation (~18months) equipment would go to our depot for a full refurbishment.

That generally consisted of a new set of 30m cables/ends for the satellite portion, and a complete strip down and cleaning of everything else.

For field service(weight matters when you have to hike a few miles with gear), I adapted a stupid high velocity 120v leaf blower down to a 1 inch nozzle.

The vast, vast majority of damage was due to operator error or neglect. It's always fun to arrive on site for a malfunctioning terminal, notice the damage, and ask what happened. Then the answer is things like, "so we have this thing called the hundred days of wind, and the terminal on the roof wasn't anchored or using ballast..."

I oversee a largish datacenter (>2MW) with only air cooling (a lot of it). Ambient temps range from -23c to +43c. Equipment gets dusty. We have some fan and psu failures, but as long as the air keeps moving, everything keeps working just fine. You'd be surprised at how well plain old airflow works.

Lots of surprised people in the comments. Folks, those parts inside your computer are rated for anywhere from 85C to 200C depending on the part. What this means is that those parts can work at this temperature indefinitely. Perhaps the only part whose lifetime depends on the temperature a lot are electrolytic capacitors, but even they are routinely rated at 105C. Your CPU is likely rated to 105C die temperature, and even then it will only throttle, not die outright. Moreover, letting energy dense parts warm up to a decent temperature improves the efficiency of cooling, because thermal gradient is much steeper. That's why Apple doesn't cool things until they have to. DIYers are obsessed with getting to the point where their CPU runs at ridiculously low temps, but the CPU itself is designed to tolerate much more. GPUs begin to throttle at something like 83C, and NVIDIA deliberately lets them to get to that temperature before fans kick in in earnest.

What's the normal lifespan of this equipment? I'd imagine this environment, particularly with the dust, would cause failure in the 5-10 year range rather than the 1-2 year range.

This is the default last mile environment for at least a couple ISPs that I've worked with. I've seen switches and other networking equipment in non air conditioned closets in the Orlando heat. The equipment doesn't seem to mind the higher temp that much.

I'm no expert at this whatsoever but from what I've gleaned looking around, a good heuristic is that removing hot air is way better than pushing cold air in.

As a kind of hand-waivy argument, I think of the difference between averaging cool air with how hot it gets ("pushing" air in) vs. removing and replacing with ambient temperature air. In the case of 'pushing' air in, the average of something like 40deg F with 300deg F is 170deg F. Even if ambient is 70deg F, by replacing air with ambient, that's a 2x better cooling, not to mention the energy saving from just using a fan compared with cooling with an air conditioner or some other equipment.

One "fun" anecdote that I like to tell everyone. I was given a 1U server by a company I was working at. Some old ~2010 machine with 32GB of RAM and 2 CPUs. I anticipated noise but not quite that much, so I decided to move it to the exterior shed that had one outlet. This was in July in Canada so peeks of 33-34 celsius are expected but not much more than that.

The shed was in the sun and would get pretty hot for humans, but I thought it would be fun to try it and worst case scenario it wouldn't last long. Turns out we had some intense heat for the entire week and the server was dead about 8 days after putting it in the shed.

I opened it to see what had happened and several capacitors had popped.

TLDR: Intense heat isn't good for 1U servers, but I bet you knew that already.

Others point out these arent terrible conditions, all things considered. I'd like to see reports of this quality for stuff in wood shops, chicken barns, cement plants, etc.

I've seen a few examples of things like that and they were entertaining in a "wow it kept on going anyway" sense.

I live in similar conditions, not quite as humid. Tempted to move my mini rack out to the garage now. Very tempting to save on the air conditioning necessitated by the equipment in my rack. May even put my virtualization server out there for awhile and see what the temps get up to.

One year isn’t enough to test reduced MTBF through increased ambient temperatures. Dust and the consequence of insulating electronic components can take years to surface problems.