WestPoint · Hardware · Rittal
In an industrial unit the problem is not the heat. It is the dust.
Cabinets and cooling, also for industrial environments and for outdoors. There the office answer —ventilate more— is exactly the wrong one, because ventilating means putting the industrial unit inside the cabinet.
What kind of manufacturer it is.
Rittal · Plant room — Cabinets and cooling, also in industrial environments. And its own ground is the one that gets solved worst in security.
It makes rack cabinets for the plant room, like anyone of this kind, and it also makes what an industrial installation really needs: closed cabinets with a declared protection rating, cooling units that mount on the door or on the side, air-to-air heat exchangers, and cabinets for outdoors.
The difference between an office cabinet and an industrial one is not the sheet metal: it is that the second declares how much it protects from dust and water, and that is a standardised number you can require in a specification. And it brings with it a consequence you have to understand before choosing: a cabinet that does not let dust in does not let air in either.
Why a closed cabinet cannot be ventilated.
It is the central decision on this page and it takes three sentences to explain.
A plant room cabinet is cooled by letting air through: cool air comes in at the bottom, hot air goes out at the top. In an industrial unit with dust in the air that puts the dust inside, and dust does three things: it blocks the filters, it builds up in the fans and it forms a layer over the electronics that acts like a blanket. In a joinery workshop, a fan with a filter can go blind in weeks.
So in a dirty environment the cabinet is closed, and then the heat has to come out without exchanging air. There are two ways. If the air in the industrial unit is cooler than the air inside the cabinet, a heat exchanger is enough: it passes the heat from one air to the other without mixing them. If the unit is at thirty-five degrees in summer, you need a cabinet cooling unit, which is a small refrigeration device mounted on the door itself.
And out of that comes the detail that shows whether somebody has fitted one before: a cabinet cooling unit produces condensation water, and that water has to be drained somewhere. The tray nobody empties and the pipe nobody connected are the classic fault on these installations, and they end with water inside the cabinet, which is exactly what you wanted to avoid.
Outdoor cabinet: a different problem.
A cabinet out in the street has two seasons and both give trouble.
In summer you have to count two kinds of heat: the heat the equipment produces and the heat the sun puts into the sheet metal. A cabinet in the sun in August can be well above air temperature, and the cheapest solution in the world is a shade roof separated from the lid, which costs little and takes off many degrees.
In winter the problem is the opposite and less obvious: when the temperature drops and the humidity is high, water condenses inside the cabinet. That is why outdoors you sometimes fit a heating element with a thermostat, which sounds absurd —heating a cabinet— and is what stops the electronics waking up wet.
And there are the two things that always get forgotten: where the cables come in, which has to be from below and through sealed glands so that neither water nor insects get in, and who has the key. A street cabinet with the electronics of some cameras inside is the most accessible point in the whole installation: it is worth having it locked with something serious and raising an alert when it is opened.
Where it fits in a video installation.
In rack cabinets for the plant room, the same as anyone on this list: structure, doors, cable management and ventilation accessories. There the conversation is the usual one: the air path, blanking panels in the free spaces and tidy cabling.
And, above all, in what an office cabinet does not cover: the closed and cooled cabinet in an industrial unit, the one in an area with dust or with product in the air, the one in a plant room with vibration, and the street cabinet where the electronics of a run of cameras or of an access barrier live.
In those places the cabinet is not a piece of furniture: it is what decides whether the electronics last five years or eighteen months. And it is one of those items that get cut from the quotation because they cannot be seen, and get paid for in full afterwards.
Where we would not fit it.
In an office with a cool room, a closed and cooled industrial cabinet is spending too much: there a normal, well-ventilated cabinet does the job, and it uses less power too.
Nor would we fit a closed cabinet without cooling in a hot industrial unit thinking it will cope. Closed and with no way to get the heat out is the worst possible combination: a sealed oven. The rule is that closing forces you to cool, and if there is no budget to cool then the place has to change.
And we would not fit a cabinet cooling unit where nobody is going to maintain it. It has a filter, it has condensate and it has a life; in an industrial unit with nobody looking at it, after two years it is a blocked box hanging off the door. If no maintenance is possible, sometimes the best decision is to take the equipment somewhere else and leave only the essentials in the unit.
What we do with it.
- Look at the environment before the cabinet: whether there is dust, of what kind, whether there is humidity, whether there is vibration, whether there are chemicals in the air and what temperature the place reaches in August. Out of that comes the protection rating and whether it has to be closed.
- The sum of the watts of what goes inside, because that is the heat that will have to come out. And the margin for what will be added.
- Decide between a heat exchanger and a cooling unit with the real temperature of the place in hand, not with the yearly average. And if it is a cooling unit, settle the condensate drainage from day one.
- Outdoors: shade over the lid, heating with a thermostat if the place condenses, sealed cable glands at the bottom and a door-opening alert.
- And the temperature sensor inside, alerting over the network. In a closed cabinet it matters more than in a ventilated one, because when the cooling fails in there the heat rises very fast.
Who administers it when we leave.
Here the natural owner is the client's maintenance team, and it is simple work if it is written down.
In an industrial company there is already a maintenance team that cleans filters, inspects cooling units and deals with alerts. The security cabinet has to go into that same round: the cooling unit filter, the condensate, the fans and a look at the temperature. It is minutes, and without them the cabinet degrades without anyone noticing.
The IT part is the alert: getting the temperature sensor and the door-open sensor through to the house alerting system. With that, a cooling unit that has blocked up is detected the day it happens, and not the day a drive breaks.
Our part is redoing the calculation when the contents of the cabinet change, and checking once a year whether the place is still the place it was: industrial units change use, a new machine goes in next to it, a vent gets closed off. The cabinet that was fine three years ago can be somewhere else without having moved.
Where to go next.
The cabinet is decided by what goes inside and by the place where it stands. Both change over time.
Get started
Do you have the security equipment in an industrial unit?
Tell us what the environment is like —dust, humidity, heat, vibration—, what equipment lives there and how it is fitted today. We will tell you whether the cabinet is the right one, whether it has to be closed and cooled, or whether the sensible thing is to take the equipment out of there.