As the trend of using modular electric rooms continues to grow in the North American market, one must consider the type of cooling deployed in these applications.

As introduced in a previous blog on the advantages of IT Cooling vs comfort cooling, deploying comfort cooling products for your modular buildings can cause a negative impact to your PUE.

Let’s look at an application for a 9900D 1600 kVA UPS in a modular electric room with batteries, switchboards, lighting, control panels, etc.

The total heat load will be approximately 234,000 BTU/hr. We’ll treat this electrical load as our “IT Load.”

A wall-mounted cooling product is chosen for this application and will require N+1 redundancy (adding one extra unit to whatever the number of cooling units is required). 

Now, let’s take a look at the amount of sensible cooling that is required to handle 234,000 BTU/hr. To simplify, we will compare Mitsubishi Electric’s DX-P with the On/Off Compressor to another product that is used in the market. 

Total pPUE of Mitsubishi Electric’s DX-P with On/Off Compressor vs Competitor

What can a lower pPUE do for your total cost of ownership?

*Power Input x 8,760 hours/year x number of units = kWh/y

**kWh/y x electricity cost

Selecting a product that is not purpose-built for the application will cost you up to an additional 55% per year. And those numbers above are just for one building UPS. Imagine if your facility has dozens of UPS systems; it's energy being wasted at your data center and will increase your PUE.

Next time, we'll talk about how our inverter unit could further assist in achieving your PUE goals, among other great advantages of this technology!