Unconditioned Texas Garage Lab - 1 year later (Its all fine)
A little over a year ago I mounted a rack in my garage, threw a Cisco Switch in there, an APC UPS and my Flight Tracking setup, and a second ESXi host. See below for the original:
Its been through the "cold" of a Houston Winter and the heat and humidity of the brutal Houston Summer. To date, nothing has even complained that its hot, in fact the fans are not even spun all the way up on the switch
The temperatures actually never got above what I see equipment go to in my air conditioned lab in the Houston, which proves that as long air is flowing through the hardware, its fine. No equipment failures, no battery failures, no SSD failures, no HDD failures, no Transceiver failures
I replaced the UPS batteries last week, but they still reported 1 hour of runtime, and passed the test fine. I now use those batteries in a spare test UPS, they were 7 years old...
There is however a LOT of dust... but it has not affected the systems. I plan to give them a good clean later on this year
There is a nice dust/dirt stain in the plywood behind the switch. I guess that means a lot of the dust ends up out the switch at least!
There isn't much more to say, because nothing of note happened, it all just works fine...
Apart from a power outage during electrical work I had done, its been running 24/7 with no problem
Full Equipment Listing for those Wondering
- Cisco Catalyst 2960-S PoE+ 10G 48 Port Switch (48 x 1G PoE+ and 2 x 10G SFP+) connected back to my main rack with OM3 Fiber @ 10G
- APC SMT1000RM2U UPS
- Lenovo M73 Tiny (i5, 16GB DDR3, 800GB Intel DC S3700 SSD, 5TB 2.5" SATA HDD) Running ESXi 6.7
- Raspberry Pi4 running ADSB Flight Tracking duties (FlightAware, ADSDX and FA24)
If you are wondering if you can run your lab in your garage, go for it. You have my permission