IVB's physical install

IVB

Senior Member
A thread dedicated to my physical equipment. I'll come back and flesh this out/take some more pics when I got some energy, but here's what I got for now.

You may have seen the other thread with my "before/physical mounting guidance" stuff. Here's an "after" picture. It ended up taking me between 5-10mins PER RUN to cut it to look clean, plus I ended up redoing several runs as I realized a better way of doing it. I went the "no pain, no gain" route, and cut every wire to 6" within the exact length needed. I fed the spare back out and pushed the wiring back a bit, but this is now the "permanent" location for the Elk cabinet. I had a contigency plan beforehand where I left 2-3 feet of extra wiring there, that's gone now.

I also came up with an interesting idea about how to flatmount items that were too small for the Elk mounting plates: I used the dual-sided Elk sticky foam, and attached it to velcro. That way I can easily remove it to put wires in, and just reattach it back.

There's still a few odds & ends to clean up (like that damn wire hanging straight through on the right), but this is already staggeringly nicer than the disgusting mess I used to have.

cabinet_new.JPG


Here's the jring & the endless velcro that I used. This was the big score, it really helped clean everything up. I actually ended up going back and re-wiring nearly 40' on average, in some cases went the full distance of close to 100' as it was really quite ugly and hokey.

jring.JPG


Still to come: Pictures of the backside of the wall. I'm going to hold off a bit on pictures of the physical room until I have a chance to build an interior wall.
 
Here's the progress on the basement, of course I couldn't do it normally, I did some interesting experiments/problems:

I used sanded plywood instead of regular plywood.

In typical IVB fashion, I decided to see how using pre-sanded Birch 2' x 4' plywood (as opposed to the rough cut 4' x 8' that you usually see) would work, that way I figured I wouldn't have to cover/paint them or stress about splinters.

The icky thing is that it required 3-4 pieces per wall, as opposed to a single piece. I'll have to put some alignment boards behind it, so it looks flush on the other side. I'll also need to do something about the seams.

I got a bathroom fan, mounted it sideways for venting purposes.

It's currently setup to vent just to the outer room, but if it gets too hot I can use regular 4" pipe to vent to the outside.

Here's pics of the first 2:
inner.jpg


Crap. I got a 23" rack
After I bought the rack off eBay, Steve pointed out why it was only $50 for a 20u rack: It was a 23" rack. I'm currently using 2x4's as rack reducers untill I get real metal ones.

Doesn't this just look purty...
rack.jpg
 
Depending on how your top & bottom rail is connected to the sides, you may be able to cut them shorter and bring your sides closer together to form a 19" rack.
 
Regarding those seams between your plywood pieces: Those pieces will expand an contract some depending on the humidity and temperature. You'll want a little gap between them to account for this. You can cover the gap with 1/4"x 3/4" trim (or the trim of your preference). With a little planning this can look pretty good. An alternate covering that works well over plywood is cork. You can buy this in a 1/4" thickness by the roll. Its flexible which accounts for wood movement and practical. You can pin notes, photos etc to it.
 
An alternate covering that works well over plywood is cork. You can buy this in a 1/4" thickness by the roll. Its flexible which accounts for wood movement and practical. You can pin notes, photos etc to it.
Hey, now that's an interesting idea. I'm going to have to look into that.
 
Note to self: When building a server room in the basement, don't forget to plug theh sump pump back in just in case you have a torrential downpower. My jigsaw is totally submerged, circular saw is halfway submerged, and tons of cardboard & other tools are pretty much destroyed. And, I have only my forgetfulness and laziness to blame :)

My basement has a raised portion and a lower portion. I have 3" of water in the lower portion (not where the servers are) cuz I never plugged the damn sump pump back in. I also have 2" of water in 2 different rooms in the basement, which the Elk warned me about via the Waterbug I bought.

I also just had PRK on my right (dominant) eye yesterday, so I can't see quite clearly, and i'm not supposed to do any heavy lifting, plus I chose to let the kids stay at home today so this'll be interesting. Hmmm. Damn, why isn't there something AutomatedOutlet sells that would actually go clean up the mess!
 
There are certain days where i'm very thankful that I DIY'ed, because this 96yr old house would have cost me an arm & a leg in hidden/future costs.

Turns out that the floor for the room in question has actually sunk on either side, and the middle is slightly higher. I never noticed b/c the old owners had put in this fugly outdoor carpeting on it, which was very visually deceptive. I only realized it tonight because I finally got sick of the carpet, ripped it out, and noticed these bizarre water pools on the linoleum that was below it. It's on 3 of the floor edges of the lowered floor. Neither me nor a pro would ever noticed, unless the pro happened to have experience in uneven basement floors. I'm bad with small measurements, but it could be as much as 3/4" or so. This is, of course, a very bad thing since I now have equipment located down there.

So now off to learn how to DIY something else - how to pour a 1ish inch concrete but slanted down towards the sump pump hole without any hard gradations that I trip over.

Yeah, that'll be interesting,
 
I've seen homes where they didn't fix the floor, they made saw cuts around the outer edges that slanted towards the sump, kinda like mini gutters.
 
Dang, so what, 17 months later I *finally* use the surface mount sensors I have to hardwire my windows. (remember that wireless sensor debachle - still haven't lived that down). We just put in a patio, so now 2 windows are kinda within reach, hence there was a clear "change imperative".

didn't turn out too awful; certainly a little uglier than I would have preferred, but there's A/C wiring directly below the windows, so the recessed type would haven't been cost-effective.

Check it out.

surface-mbr-profile.jpg


surface-mbr-base.jpg


surface-mbr-hidden.jpg
 
Looks good. You can always paint the wire to match the wall color, and if you really need to, pop off your trim and run it down the wall and then behind the trim
 
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