Cooling needed?

[Creashor]

Hi

I am about to house all my AV equipment on a Hi Fi rack in the cupboard under the stairs.

The cupboard is fairly normal sized, about 5 ft at its tallest sloping to nothing 6ft along.

It will be housing:

1 x Pioneer AV receiver
1 x Pioneer DVD player
1 x SKY HD box
1 x Wii
1 x PS3
1 x Xbox 360

Anyone got any ideas/views about the cooling requirement in this sort of environment?

Thanks

Nick

[Nickiniquity]

Hi Nick,
Yep. I've done something similar. I build an mdf 'rack' which fits into the sloped area under the stairs. This houses 3 amplifiers, my DC1, a DVD jukebox and a <spit>VCR. I also have a $ky box, FTA satellite rx and a freeview box placed side by side on top of the rack in open air. These are powered 24x7, everything in the rack bar the VCR is physically powered-off unless it is used. The rack contains a couple of fans which blow air horizontally across the rack. These are arranged to switch on when any of the amplifers are used, and work well to keep the amps nice and cool. I find that the temperature in the understairs cupboard does get quite warm with everything in use, but it isn't excessive.

If your rack design has all the has all the equipment stacked close together on shelves, I think that you will need some fan cooling arangement to prevent them getting hot, but I wouldn't worry about the entire cupboard overheating. This is why I moved my kit to be out in open air (the rack fans I used are too noisey to leave on all the time....but then they were 'reclaimed' from a skip!).

Nick

[GreasyWeasel]

With the kit you are looking at, I'd definitely look into ventilating the cupboard some how. The Xbox360 produces a massive amount of heat and very quickly, due to this they are also very prone to overheating if not in a well ventilated place. I haven't had experience of the PS3 yet but from what I have heard they too get very hot. I have my kit (similar to what you have) set up in my loft cinema which is about 18'x16', now admittedly I also have a projector but the room does get rather warm after a few hours play on the Xbox360 so I would imagine that an under stair cupboard would get hot very quickly.