Server rooms,
right-sized.
A complete design set for rooms of twenty racks or fewer — siting, layout, cooling, power, grounding, suppression, cabling and commissioning. Written because published data-center guidance targets facilities of hundreds or thousands of racks, where the economics and the right answers are different.
Size the room
Live · the plan above redraws to scaleGeometry
30″ pitch · 4′ cold + 3′-6″ rack + 3′ hot + 3′-6″ rack + 4′ cold = 18′ deep · 7′-6″ service zone
Thermal
BTU/hr = kW × 3412 · CFM = BTU ÷ (1.08 × ΔT) · nom. tons = sensible tons ÷ SHR 0.72
Electrical
3φ: A = kW × 1000 ÷ (V × √3) · branch kW = V × 30 × 0.8 ÷ 1000 · UPS = kW ÷ 0.9 PF × 1.25
Small rooms are their own problem
Almost all published data-center guidance is written for facilities of hundreds or thousands of racks, where fixed overhead vanishes into the total and every subsystem gets a dedicated engineer. At ten racks the economics invert.
- CostFixed overhead dominates. Lighting, a UPS idling at 30 % load and a cooling unit cycling against a small load are a large fraction of your total — not a rounding error.
- LiabilityYou are your own engineer of record. The room won’t get a dedicated MEP team. You need to be able to defend every number to an inspector.
- SizingVendor defaults miss. A 20-ton CRAH is oversized for a 40 kW load. Split DX to a roof condenser is often the right answer, and rarely the recommended one.
That gap is the whole reason this exists. Every dimension, rating and concentration in the guide is one you can compute, check and defend — drawn from NEC 2023, NFPA 75/2001, TIA-942-C, TIA-607-D, ASHRAE TC 9.9 and BICSI 002.
28 sheets across nine disciplines
Organized the way a drawing set is, so a sheet reference means the same thing here as it does on the plans.
Three rooms, worked end to end
The 10-rack room is the default case. The guide also carries a 20-rack room with in-row cooling, contained hot aisle and A/B power distribution, and a narrow single-row room for when width is at a premium. Click any plate to enlarge.
Who this is for
Facilities & IT managers
Responsible for a small comms or MDF room, and tired of translating hyperscale guidance down to their scale.
Integrators
Low-voltage contractors speccing a room for a client and needing a defensible starting point.
Engineers of record
Looking for a compact reference that names the underlying standard for every number it prints.
Students
In EE, ME and BICSI programs, wanting a worked example that shows the arithmetic end to end.
Free, ad-free,
and staying that way
No paywall, no signup, no ads, and no analytics following you around the web. The disclaimer sets out exactly what is and is not collected, and where the guide stops and your engineer of record and AHJ begin.