Server Room Air Conditioning Installation
Purpose-designed cooling for server rooms, comms rooms and small data halls — with the redundancy, humidity control and remote monitoring your uptime depends on.
From £6,500 for dual 5kW system
Fixed-price quote, held to the day.
2–5 days
Typical timeline from survey to commissioning.
5-Year Warranty
Parts and labour covered on every install.
F-Gas Certified
REFCOM-registered engineers on every job.
- N+1 dual-unit redundancy
- Auto-changeover on fault (lead/lag)
- Humidity control 45–55% RH
- SNMP/Modbus alarms to your monitoring platform
Why choose this
- N+1 dual-unit redundancy
- Auto-changeover on fault (lead/lag)
- Humidity control 45–55% RH
- SNMP/Modbus alarms to your monitoring platform
What's included
- Precision close-control or high-spec split
- Dual condensers on separate power feeds
- Condensate pump with high-water alarm
- 24/7 fault escalation to duty engineer
Why comfort cooling isn't enough
A standard comfort split is sized for occasional use and cycles off when the room hits setpoint. Server rooms need continuous cooling — the load is 100% year-round. Ordinary units short-cycle in this environment and fail within 2–3 years. Precision units are designed for 8,760 hours/year of operation with duty-cycled compressors and beefier fans.
Comfort units also lack humidity control. Servers need 45–55% relative humidity — below 40% risks electrostatic discharge (fried PCBs); above 60% risks condensation on cold metal surfaces. Precision close-control units maintain the band automatically; comfort units let humidity drift wherever the sensible cooling load dictates.
Redundancy strategy
For any room with mission-critical kit we specify N+1 — two units, either of which can carry the full load. They alternate weekly (lead/lag), so both stay serviced and neither develops the seal degradation that comes from long idle periods. On a fault, changeover happens within 30 seconds via the room controller.
For tier-3 style comms rooms we go further — 2N with fully independent power feeds, independent condensate discharge, physical separation of indoor and outdoor units, and diverse cable routes for control wiring. This is what banks, hospitals and telcos install as standard.
Monitoring and alarms
Every install includes remote monitoring — SNMP traps or Modbus/BACnet output to your existing NOC platform, plus SMS/email alerts direct to our 24/7 duty phone. Temperature excursions, condensate high-level, filter clog and refrigerant loss all trigger managed response.
Alarm categories are prioritised — a filter dirty alert emails during business hours, a lead unit fault triggers immediate lag changeover and an SMS to your duty admin, and a total cooling failure escalates to our on-call engineer plus your primary and secondary contacts. Every event is logged with timestamps for your ISO 27001 audit trail.
Airflow strategy for racks
How air moves inside the room matters more than raw cooling capacity. Cold-aisle/hot-aisle rack layout — front intakes facing cold aisles, rear exhausts facing hot aisles — cuts required cooling capacity by 20–30% versus mixed airflow. We survey rack layout at design stage and recommend re-orientation if needed before cooling equipment is sized.
For smaller comms rooms with under-floor or high-level supply, we specify variable-speed EC fans that ramp with load. This avoids the classic problem of cold air blowing straight past racks and short-cycling back to the return without absorbing any heat.
Condensate and water management
Water inside a server room is a career-ending event. Every unit includes a condensate pump with high-water float switch wired to the alarm system. Pump discharge routes to a safe termination outside the room — never above a server rack, never through a suspended ceiling that shares space with cable trays.
We also specify leak detection cable around the perimeter of the unit and drain-pan area. A leak triggers alarm to your NOC and, on request, cuts local power via a shunt trip relay — protecting the equipment even at the cost of a scheduled cooling outage.
Free cooling for larger rooms
Rooms above 15 kW cooling load benefit from indirect free cooling — an air-to-air economiser that uses outside air (via heat exchanger, not direct mix) whenever ambient drops below room setpoint. In the UK this delivers 50–70% of annual cooling for free, cutting energy bills dramatically.
Combined with variable-speed EC fans and precision humidification, a modern free-cooling data-room can achieve PUE below 1.4 — competitive with hyperscale cloud infrastructure. We size and specify this for any room where the electricity payback beats the additional capex, typically at 20 kW+ load.
Fire suppression compatibility
Server rooms with fire suppression (typically FM-200, Novec 1230 or Inergen) need cooling systems that interact safely with the suppression release sequence. On alarm activation the AC fans must stop within a specified time to prevent dilution of the extinguishing agent below its rated concentration.
We supply cooling systems with dry-contact fan-shutdown inputs wired to your fire panel, tested during commissioning against the suppression system's release timing. Post-discharge the AC resumes automatically once room concentration drops below alert thresholds — restoring cooling without manual intervention.
Growth planning and modular expansion
Server rooms rarely stay the same size for long. We design cooling capacity with 30–50% headroom on day one and specify condensers that can accept additional indoor units without reconfiguration. When the fifth server rack goes in, we add a matched indoor cooling unit without disturbing the existing cooling infrastructure.
For rooms expected to grow above 25 kW total load, we design free-cooling capability from day one — the additional capex is small at initial install but retrofitting free cooling into an existing room is 3–4× the cost. Long-term planning pays off dramatically on any room with a 10+ year operational horizon.
Documentation for ISO 27001 and SOC 2 audits
Financial services, healthcare and any organisation seeking ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification needs documented cooling infrastructure. Our server-room installations ship with: full commissioning report, redundancy design rationale, alarm escalation matrix, service SLA terms, refrigerant log, electrical single-line diagrams and monthly PPM records.
All documents are provided in editable format so your compliance team can incorporate them directly into your Statement of Applicability without retyping. On request we can also produce annual maintenance summary reports specifically formatted for external audit.
Precision cooling — sensible vs total capacity
Comfort AC is rated on total capacity — sensible cooling (temperature reduction) plus latent cooling (dehumidification). Because comfort spaces have humid occupants, total is higher than sensible, and latent capacity is genuinely useful. Server rooms have almost no latent load — servers do not sweat, and outside air infiltration is minimal. A comfort AC rated 5 kW total might deliver only 3.5 kW sensible in a server room, undersizing the cooling by 30%.
Precision close-control units are rated on sensible capacity, ensuring the temperature reduction actually happens. A 5 kW CRAC unit delivers 5 kW of sensible cooling — 40% more usable capacity than a comfort AC of the same nameplate. This is why comparing precision and comfort by nameplate always disadvantages the correct choice. Our design proposals explicitly split sensible and latent capacity so like-for-like comparison is possible.
Uptime SLAs and financial-services requirements
Financial services, healthcare and telco server rooms often carry SLAs specifying maximum allowed cooling downtime per year (often 99.999% = 5.26 minutes/year). Achieving this requires more than N+1 redundancy — dual power feeds from different substations, dual condenser positions with independent refrigerant loops, dual condensate discharge paths, and 4-hour parts-on-site guarantees from the manufacturer.
Our tier-3 server room specification meets 99.99% availability (52 minutes/year) as standard; tier-4 (99.999%) is available where required. Each SLA level ships with the design rationale, single-point-of-failure analysis and quarterly witness testing regime that your compliance auditors will want to see. We hold spares on our vans for critical customers to reduce parts-on-site times to under 2 hours across most of the UK.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use it as a normal comfort unit too?＋
Not really — server-room units run tight temperature bands (18–22 °C) that feel cold for occupants. Comms rooms with only occasional access are fine.
Do you offer 24/7 SLA?＋
Yes — 4-hour response and 8-hour fix SLAs are standard. Faster response available for tier-2 sites.
What if the alarm fires at 3am?＋
Our on-call engineer answers within 15 minutes, remotes into the controller to triage, and dispatches on-site if physical intervention is needed. All time-stamped.
Do you supply UPS for the AC unit itself?＋
We integrate with existing UPS. For new installs we can specify a dedicated line-interactive UPS sized to bridge the AC through generator start (typically 30–60 seconds).
How much noise inside the server room?＋
55–65 dB at 1 m — louder than comfort AC but well below the noise the servers themselves produce. Acoustic treatment is available for adjacent occupied spaces.
Do you handle the electrical distribution?＋
Yes — dedicated MCB, RCBO or ATS depending on redundancy tier. Electrical work is Part P certified and third-party inspected on request.
Do I need cooling if I only have 2–3 servers?＋
Any dedicated equipment room with more than 1.5 kW of continuous IT load needs dedicated cooling. Below that, a well-ventilated comms cupboard with a wall-mounted comfort AC is usually adequate.
What about DC power for the AC unit itself?＋
For high-availability sites we can specify AC units with DC-input options rated for 48 V or 380 V DC — feeding directly from the site DC bus without inverter losses.
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