At the heart of any integrated home system is the equipment rack, and how it is laid out is crucial. Yet integrators don't always agree on the best practices for optimally building an equipment rack. Here are some guiding principles for the laying out and installing a nice rack.

Airflow: A good rack is a semi-sealed unit, with a managed, measured airflow. Even without fans, convection should draw heat away from the equipment, allowing it to operate in an acceptable temperature range.

With that in mind, the equipment that generates the most heat should be located towards the bottom of the rack. In the old days, that was exclusively amplifiers. But today, this includes devices like media servers and HD PVRs. The principle here is that even without an active cooling system, heat will rise up and away from the hottest devices, and dissipate out of the upper vents before the devices above them warm up. Add in active cooling from a fan system, as you should, and the convection is boosted, keeping the rack cool.

Ergonomics: While some racks are hidden away in an equipment room, others are accessible by the client, such as in some media and cinema room designs.

In the case of racks where users need access to equipment like Blu-ray players, or most likely a game console, give thought to locating these devices at a universally reachable height, such as waist-level for an average-sized adult. Bending over to load a disc is inconvenient and aggravating, and the client's children shouldn't have to climb a chair to load a disc into the PlayStation 3.

Serviceability: The reality of electronics is that sometimes devices die, and need to be replaced. This is especially true of HD-PVRs. With that in mind, unbolting and removing a dead component from a rack can be time consuming, but that can be minimized by organizing the wire management in a clear and logical manner such that that removing any one device doesn't interfere with the wiring for too many other boxes.

By that same token, designers and installers need to know all of the devices inside and out, along with their requirements then account for these before bolting equipment into the rack. Case in point: a few years ago, I tested a 4x4 HDMI matrix switcher. The switcher had a bank of dip switches hidden beneath a panel on the underside of the box. Strangely, the factory presets were not what was needed for the device to function: the installer needed to reset them. I learned this from their tech support; the information was not in the manual.) If I had already bolted the box into a rack and wired it up before this discovery, that would have been a colossal waste of time.

Labeling: It's no exaggeration that a rack will contain dozens or hundreds of cables. Integrators need two things to simplify their cabling: Different coloured cables for each discipline (control, video, etc), as well as a sturdy label maker like a Dymo Rhino Pro. Colour-coding plus clear, concise labels for what each cable is and where it's going is central to a good design philosophy.

For readers who want to learn more, rack vendor Middle Atlantic's Thermal Management White Paper covers rack design in great detail, and is an invaluable resource that's worth studying.

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