The original post: /r/homelab by /u/cathode_01 on 2025-02-05 03:00:25.
Hi folks, I’m working on floor plan for a big remodel to my house’s basement, and one of the upgrades will be changing out an old water heater to a new heat-pump type unit (the LG one that looks like a spaceship). I haven’t owned a heat-pump water heater before but my understanding is they extract heat from the air around them, and put it into the water tank. So the closet or room they’re in gets quite cool.
This seemed like a great thing to have on the hot aisle side of my small home lab rack. My initial thought was to have a closet or small room with a 4-post rack embedded into the wall, exhaust side into the closet. That way all the waste heat from the servers could be utilized by the water heater. When I shared this idea with a friend her immediate reaction was “what if there’s a leak in the plumbing?” and I guess that’s a good question. Do you folks typically worry about environmental dangers around your equipment? Water would have to leak from exactly the right point and perfectly spray towards the server rack 2-4 feet away in the which seems unlikely…
This is a rough sketch of the layout I’m looking at. The dashed rectangle representing the rack is a 19" x 28" space which accounts for the depth of my rack. So there’s about 20" of clearance behind it which I feel like should be plenty to get back there when I need to move cables or anything gets installed or removed.
The through-wall rack will have to be a custom thing, I have an existing 42U 4-post rack that I’ll probably try and add some sort of bezel around to install it flush to the wall surface in the finished space.
While I have a 42U it’s only got a handful of things in it. A supermicro 4U storage server, a dell R710 running pfSense, another supermicro 2U that gets turned on occasionally as a docker container host, and a couple cat6 patch panels and 24-port gigabit switches that handle cabling installed in the house. I think I’d likely add to this in the future though.