CO2 Problem in the Studio

Besides the PC problem I had another nasty problem I had to deal with the last weeks. I'm make long hours in the studio now and during the day I started to feel bad. Normally I'm quite stressed out when a deadline is coming and that can cause some physical problems on me, but I didn't trust it so I went to the doctor. He couldn't find anything wrong on me. But I had a suspicion. I think because it didn't smell to fresh when I entered the studio. Of course I'm in a basement and I started to doubt the ventilation. So I bought this CO2 meter online. Now you see a value of 661 ppm which is kind of normal indoors, but when I switched it on it went in alarm right away. Over 800 it says you need to ventilate and it was over 1100! Well I guess that explained my issues. The ventilation from the hall into the studio seemed sufficient when we measured it, but after investigation with a specialist it turns out I'm breathing in the used air from the living room down stairs. I can actually see on this meter when there are people upstairs. So another problem I have to solve. There needs to come fresh air from outside now here downstairs :( I'll have to figure out now how to do that. Now I have some doors open and every fan is running on full power and now the CO2 level is normal. But it is not ideal and for sure not a permanent solution.

Apollo Studio Airco Installation (Part 3)

All work on the installation of the air conditioning is done now. Here you can see a picture of the inside unit that was placed in the server room next to the studio. This one was really necessary since there is a lot of computers and storage units in there. When I switched everything on and closed the door it would get very warm very quickly. This unit is a special unit that can run day and night and it regulates itself so it doesn't run full speed power all the time like a lot of airco units do. It also uses less power in this way.

Here you can see where it is placed. It is on the back wall of the server room directly behind the 19 inch rack that holds all the servers and storage. As you can see it takes two 230 Volt power lines to hook it up. A special group was created for this unit as well by the electrician on the power distributor that he made downstairs. I'm not sure why there are two power connections I think one is for the inside unit and one is for the outside unit since they pulled an extra power cable along with the cooling pipes to the roof. But I forgot to ask about this.

And here you can see the result of the airco. All equipment is switched on now and the door is closed. It felt nice and comfortable right away. I put the air conditioning on its highest possible cooling and after a few hours I measured and the result. It was a stunning 19 degrees Celsius!! The humidity is quite stable stable at about 54 percent which is ideal for the equipment and I put the temperature higher now to 23 degrees. That is cool enough for the equipment and takes less energy. It has no use to make it too cold. Well this concludes the airco installation. At least something is really finished now :)

Apollo Studio Airco Installation (Part 2)

The airco installation in the studio is done now. Here you see a picture of the unit that is placed in the hall. On the left you see a little pump that pumps out the moisture that is taken from the air. This water is then pumped upstairs. You can also see that they made a nice enclosure around the airco unit from white painted steel. It looks much nicer now. It is still a big thing, but it is just a hall where it is hanging so who cares :) It shouldn't have been much deeper though. The door can only just open under it.


On the other side they also made a nice cover for the hole they made. They mounted a wooden plate and painted it in the right color with the paint we still had left. When they were done installing they switched it on and there was no cold air coming from it. They said it would take a while before it would be cold. But after an hour or so it still was blowing air at normal temperature and it even switched itself off after about two hours. So the next day I called them and they came very quickly finding out that they forgot something silly on the outside unit. But after that it worked like a charm. It is much nicer to work in the studio now. And the noise is quite low, but I can switch it off with a remote when it is not nessecary.

The electrician was there during the installation as well, to provide the airco installation with power from two extra groups. He also mounted an extra pump for the ventilation system. We used to have one for the upstairs and downstairs of the new part together. But since upstairs in this room there is a washing machine and dryer the ventilation has to be on full power, where for downstairs the medium power was sufficient and gave less noise in the studio. So now they are separated on two pumps and I can control the new one from downstairs as well, where the controls used to be upstairs first. The control comes with a timer as well, each time I press a knob I can give it 10 minutes of full power. So usually when I leave to studio I press it a couple of times. But now everything is nice and comfy. Last thing left is an airco for the server room. There airco is needed because it gets very hot from the computers running there.

Apollo Studio Airco Installation (Part 1)

Today we started with one of the last technical projects for my new studio. The installation of and air conditioning system for the studio and the server room. We hoped it wasn't necessary, but the server room overheated very quickly with the door closed. And that door was there for a reason namely to keep the noise out of the studio. And in the studio I was very much under the impression that there wasn't coming enough fresh air in just by the active ventilation system that was initially installed. When I was working there for a longer period it just didn't feel comfortable any more. So first thing today was drill a large hole from upstairs to the server room for all the piping to go through.

Here you can see the big diamond drill they used for that hole. The chunk of concrete you see lying next to the drill isn't all by the way. The whole of that drill was necessary to get down there. It took almost an hour to do this. The concrete is very hard and they hit a lot of steel. These kind of drills also use a lot of water so it was quite messy. Luckily we packed everything in plastic downstairs below the hole (well were the water was supposed to come out) and that worked well. So nothing spilled on the carpet or anything. The hole is big enough by the way to stick your arm in.

Next thing to do was to cut a large hole above the door of my studio. Trough this hole the fresh air will be blown in later. It is amazing by the way how much easier the studio door closes and opens now this hole is there. There is no more pressure difference. This also indicates me that there is no way enough fresh air was being sucked in just from under the door. So I'm glad I decided to install this after all. Of course this hole will be covered later by some nice air outlet panel. This hole was a lot easier to make by the way since this wall is not made of concrete. It is just an inside wall made of kind of big brick like blocks.

And in this picture you can see the other side of the wall. The inside air conditioning box is mounted on the ceiling. Between this unit and the hole over the door they will mount a special sound dampener to make sure there won't be too much noise in the studio from the airco unit. This unit outputs the cold air and on the other side there will be another unit on the roof that dissipates the heat. There will also come another inside and outside unit for the serverroom. For this reason they had to drill the big hole since all the cooling piping and also electricity has to go through for both units. On Monday they will continue this project and hopefully I'm ready for the summer then :)