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On Sat, 12 Dec 2009, Julian Hall wrote:
Gordon Henderson wrote:However I did almost burn myself on removing the PSU - it was red hot!Now making me thing twice about leaving PC's on 24/7 - especially in an unoccupied house.... But where would you draw the line? All the phone charger PSUs we have, PSUs for ADSL modem/routers, Wi-Fi access points, (I did have one of those almost catch fire too - wish I'd kept it!)That sounds like two separate but related issues.Ventilation. A cupboard under the stairs doesn't sound that well ventilated so hot air coming out of the back of the computer doesn't have anywhere to go, except build up and *theoretically* get sucked in the front eventually making matters worse.
I've actually thought about that, and I keep regular checks on it's temperature - and because I'm a bit of a low-power efficientcy nut, the total power in that cupboard is usually well under 150 watts. (and 55-60 of those is the in the UPS )-:
http://unicorn.drogon.net/tx.pngthat's the disk temperatures for the past 24 hours and past week. Well inside what's sensible... But things started to get intersting at about 10:30 last night, but not intersting enough for it to send me a TXT message before it croaked...
The PSU is the only fan that would pull air through the case, and it pulls it in over the disk drives, so surprising that they showed a temperature increase...
The PSU rating. I always tend to over-engineer on this and use a good quality (the heavier the better) PSU rated higher than I think I'm going to need. That way I end up with a reliable good quality PSU running under capacity and therefore cooler.
Good advice - this has a 250 watt PSU for a < 50 watt system... ("Compatable with new Intel Prescot CPU" it says on the side ;-)
But where would you draw the line?This is a slightly smaller than usual desktop type case, with a non-standard PSU side - but it is quite old - some 6 years. I bought 6 of them once upon a time and I have had another box fail - which is why I have spare PSUs!
Cheers, Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html