Home Improvement

Choose the Right Furniture for Your Outdoor Work Area

Blog provided by Wicker Paradise

When it comes to office design, outdoor work areas are growing in acceptance among major companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. These companies aren’t just adding outdoor work areas to follow a hip trend. There are measurable benefits to working outdoors, such as increased health, energy, memory, and stress relief. If you’d like your employees to take advantage of the great outdoors, it’s important to create the best possible outdoor work area for their benefit.

If you’ve never furnished an outdoor work area before, there’s one important tip you should remember: don’t use indoor furniture for outdoor areas. Indoor furniture was not designed to weather the effects of nature. It may not stand up to rain, moisture, sunlight, and harmful microorganisms such as allergy-causing mold and mildew. Many indoor furniture products can be damaged by these conditions. Fortunately, there are sets of outdoor furniture made from materials such as synthetic resin that can dry quickly and resist sunlight damage and microorganisms.

If you want outdoor furniture that is both stylish and functional, consider Wicker Paradise’s outdoor wicker furniture sets. Their exquisitely-weaved wicker design mimics the craftsmanship of natural wicker furniture while being made from synthetic materials that will shield your furniture from the outdoors. Your employees will appreciate and be inspired by the outdoor wicker furniture’s aesthetically pleasing nature.

While you’re there, be sure to check out Wicker Paradise’s high-quality collection of natural rattan and seagrass furniture for more indoor styles and options, or look through their Lane Venture collection for more elegant styles.

Example uses of portable air conditioners

There are cooling solutions for various scenarios. However, due to several factors, the popularity of portable cooling is growing. Here are a few scenarios where it is increasingly used:

Data centers

As data centers expand rapidly, the time and the work required to install dedicated large format air conditioners grows. The larger tech companies have mobile setup teams that move from data center to data center setting them up. Initial setup will always involve the use of a server room air conditioner. However, once the setup teams move on, any expansion of the data center will involve the use of portable air conditioners to provide cooling rather than interrupt regular operations to upgrade existing equipment.

Outdoor events

This is probably the most common use of portable air conditioners. Not only are they used to cool staging areas and lounges, they are also used to cool the various engineering sites that support the event. Everything from the recording studio, lighting control area and production studios on-site will be cooled using portable air conditioners. This is especially true for daytime events where temperatures can run high and critical equipment will need to be operated for days.

These are just two example of the growing use cases for portable cooling. Some other examples are factories, smaller offices, and building which have no facility for ducting or wall mounted units. Even households use them for increased cooling during events or for spot cooling.

Choosing an air conditioner for small spaces

When choosing an air conditioner, especially for a smaller space, it is important to consider all the options and what will best fit your needs. Since this is about a smaller space, using large or split type air conditioning units can be ruled out. This leaves two options: window units and portable air conditioners. Here we look at the main advantages and disadvantages between the two types:

Portable units

The obvious advantage here is portability. You can essentially place it wherever you want in a room as long as there is a power outlet. Some of them come with casters to easily roll around from room to room. In smaller spaces, where natural light is important, losing window space for an air conditioner can mean a lot less light. This is yet another advantage of portable units over windowed.

Window units

These units are heavier, cannot be moved easily and take up a lot of window space. However, when floor space is a at a premium, a window unit is perfect. The unit is placed entirely outside and takes no additional space. Then there is also the question of cooling.  Window units are more power efficient than portable units, cooling better for less electricity. When it comes to noise levels, window units and portable have roughly the same though in the case of window units, the noise will be mostly outside.

 

Cost-Saving Tips for Server Rooms

The more IT-dependent your business, the more data, cooling components, networking equipment and power units are needed. The more of these devices you have; the more money you’ll waste on energy. And as you come to notice, you’ll be spending a lot of money running a server room. Still, you can use portable cooling units, traditional A/C units and features in the room to save money on keeping your server rooms operational.

 

Turn Off Unused Servers

A simple fix to save at least 30 % of your energy bill is simply shutting off a server, which could amount to an upwards of $4,000 in savings a year. By updating server hardware and applications, companies can better track the apps running on each server to consolidate excessive inventory. Most companies fail to understand that not all servers need to be used at once. Instead, consolidation can improve your saving strategy.

 

Turn Up the Heat

It might sound counter-intuitive, but increasing the temperature to 80 degrees can save on costs and keep your IT equipment operational. By raising the temperature slightly, and keeping portable AC units near the hottest servers, you can measure the inlet temperature use a digital thermometer to keep the temperature steady.

 

Remove Duplicate Equipment

Say you have a dual power supplies while operating UPS equipment. You’re using both, but you don’t need too. Well, duplicate equipment means double the cost, and as you may already know, some of your IT equipment doesn’t require a backup power supply unit to keep things running. In fact, some applications can operate fine when restarted without any major ramifications. Even worse is the simple idea that duplicate power-consuming equipment causes a drop in efficiency for your system.

 

Proper Airflow Management

Airflow management requires one simple idea: providing cold air to the front of your IT equipment while avoiding any hot air to mix with the cold air. Portable air conditioning units can help, while removing unused IT racks can help improve airflow toward equipment placed further back. If you need additional cooling systems, you can easily find a rental portable air conditioner to help improve the airflow inside a closet or a server room.

 

As your energy bill continues to climb, you’ll start to map out methods for lowering your costs to provide the most efficient server room possible. Your room may only need improved ventilation by opening a door or as complex as installing a new A/C system to improve airflow.

Portable cooling for data centers

Computer cooling is by far one of the most important concerns in business servers and machines. With the sheer amount of work that these machines do, you can surely bet that it produces a great deal of heat as a byproduct. And if you aren’t careful about it, you are going to have problems with your equipment. Cooling is a primary concern, and you need to make sure as well that you take this seriously as overheating mainframes or servers will cause havoc to your business. Can you imagine working and communicating with different offices and businesses without having your network up and running? Especially during the summer, your equipment can take a huge hit with the increase in temperatures. To counter this, you need to make sure that your cooling systems remain consistent. If your cooling systems can’t compensate with the heat of summer, you need to complement your air conditioning with equipment such as a spot cooler. Target these things to your mainframes and servers to make sure that they remain at a constant temperature so they can keep functioning properly and efficiently. If you don’t, that would definitely cause a great deal of problems for you. Can you imagine how much money that you would lose if your network had to shut down to prevent damage caused by overheating. That would definitely be problematic. Quite simply put, you won’t be able to do business if your system bogs down. And that would result to hundreds and thousands of dollars in losses.

Portable air conditioners are a godsend. Especially when the summer months start to come, you will need all the cooling that you can get.

Better Cooling For Your Computer Room

 

Your computer room is a place that always seems cool and cold. In your office, this is probably the one place you want to stay in all day and just sleep, especially during the summer. Do you ever wonder why though?

Computers need to be cool

Computers normally run hot. This is common knowledge but did you know that temperatures can run near boiling point if you leave a computer on for an extended period of time, while it’s doing processor intensive work, or during really hot seasons. It gets even worse when you combine all three of those. That is why computer rooms need that cold air conditioner to keep things cool.

Better cooling

The normal stationary air conditioner is not enough, though. A stationary air conditioner will create hot and cold spots in the room since air will only flow in one path. Using a portable room air conditioner can prevent these hot and cold spots from forming so you have a room with a nice and even cool. You can also take advantage of the portability by directing it straight at your computer. A portable room air conditioner will also prevent the rest of room from becoming too cold for people to effectively work in while still keeping the computers cool. It is also advisable to get a portable dehumidifier to help keep the room cool with less effort from the AC unit. Also, a dehumidifier can help keep your computers from breaking due to excess moisture in the air.

 

Keeping Computers Cool

Most big and large offices have a computer or server room. It is in this room where they store a large amount of computers, servers, and other related machines. It is common knowledge that all of these machines emit heat as they run and work. And seeing as this one room will have a lot of computers or servers, maybe even hundreds of them all group tightly together in one room, this equates to a lot of heat. That is why, if you’ve noticed, these server rooms are always cold and have their air conditioning units set to a really low temperature. However, these AC units are stationary ones, which means the source of cold air stays in one place. This leads to a longer time to keep the room at an equal and cool temperature and also leads to hot and cold spots in the room.

However, portable A/C units can help solve this problem real easy! By being able to move the air conditioning units around, you can eliminate hot pockets in the room, creating even computer cooling. And because you’re able to move it around and eliminate hot spots, the room, as a whole, cools faster., saving energy and lowering your electricity costs.

It is important to keep  your computer and server room cool to make sure that your computers are running at 100% efficiency. Cool computers are fast computers. Switch to portable A/C units to increase productivity in the office and reduce electricity costs.