welcome to recycled idaho where two recycling industry veterans brett eckhart nick snyder explore idaho businesses and organizations that are putting in the work to keep idaho environmentally and economically viable at the same time take a listen to how these entrepreneurs business owners and operators are making things happen in the great state of idaho it feels so good to be back with another boots on the ground in this episode i get a chance to walk around with dennis fox owner of fox eating and cooling and dj with conor quinn data centers i learned a lot about how important the respect process is for a successful data center and how a data center really works enjoy the video welcome everybody nick here with another boots on the ground it’s been a while but i’m excited to get back out here so everyone can see you know the real like nuts and bolts of some of these industries and how some of this recycling comes to be but like what they do i got vijay over here with tonic quinn how’s it going you guys will probably recognize dennis from our sit down a few weeks ago

hi everybody and i’d like uh to just kind of hear about what we’re doing like what tonic quint does yeah so tony quinn we are a data center and cloud hosting company uh what dennis does for us is he does the ac hvac units for us that brings in the ton of cooling that keeps the data center nice and cold so the servers stay nice and running and they don’t get overheated and they crash or anything like that so part of what a data center does is that it’s a location where miscellaneous companies industries can house their data servers and from what that means is they can manage all their storage their infrastructure whatever it takes to run that company from a technical standpoint when it comes to cloud hosting what that means is that a lot of people hear the word icloud or you know aws and those kind of terms flying around but what that really means uh for us here at toniquent is we do a cloud infrastructure as a service regularly known as cloud is and what that means is that it’s an option for companies to come in and

we take care of all the hardware we take care of all the power all the cooling all that stuff and what the company itself has to do on their end is just manage their storage and their infrastructure so we take away all the headache and they just get to deal with what they want to do with it so for instance like icloud i have icloud on my phone we have a lot of apple devices in my family i use it for work too and a lot of this marketing stuff that i helped with had my icloud filled up super quick so i had to pay for more i paid 10 bucks a month for 50 gigs so then i’m really like that 50 that storage is really like in a server room somewhere correct you know that’s how it works because i know a lot of people don’t really know like you know where that stuff goes it just like goes up it’s like a magical thing and but there’s just so much more to the whole but you’re right the cloud isn’t some mystical thing that floats above us it is actually hard

servers that are located in different data centers or like apple has their own data centers all over the country in the world uh that’s backing up this information and in the cloud we call them vms which stands for virtual machine and what that virtual machine is doing is it’s actually taking care of all that reproduction and duplication of what the storage is and you hinted this but where the hvac companies come in as where dennis specializes in a lot of these um data centers yeah all those all those servers that make up the clouds generate all kinds of heat yeah right i mean they use a lot of power and the power converts right on into heat so a data center is very densely populated in a lot of cooling needs so when it comes to cooling the servers they have definitely requirements not only keeping cool but the humidity needs to be at the right levels too so the heating and air conditioning side of the house is pretty big and in fact that’s why a lot of customers come to a place like this where it’s you know they’re not paying for

the whole building and all that they just pay for their little you know their square feet and the power they use um because if you put it in your office let’s say well your the office is designed to keep people comfortable right not servers the same thing with the power in an office the power’s there to turn lights on and stuff like that not to dedicate to make sure that the power never shuts off so in data centers we’ve got huge amounts of power redundancy and cooling and its redundancy and that’s where people like me come in so how much air does it require to keep your guys’s servers cool well right now we have 177 ton uh air well water chiller that produces all of our ac to keep it cool and we keep the data center about 68 degrees 69 degrees and we’re about i think we’re at a quarter capacity of usage right now so we have way more than we actually need but as our infrastructure and our server space grows it means more heat so that’s why we need the extra hvac you have room for growth at the

moment nice yeah yeah and then we’ve got out on the floor and we’ll show some stuff we’ve got what are called cracks computer room air conditioners which you have recycled mini from another data center that i was at and those machines can heat the air reheat it right they can cool the air they can humidify the air and they can dehumidify the air so they do everything and they filter it so they do all of that conditioning of them so when we go look there’s some that are hooked up to the chiller system so there’s chillers outside that produce chilled water and we bring that water in and we cool the air with that and then the machine will do the other things that i said and then there’s other ones that have refrigerant systems built into them and those ones will look identical here but when we get up on the roof you may see some of that equipment too so lots of different infrastructure for them lots of stuff to recycle when that day when those days come yeah and that’s where it’s all it all comes back to you know recycled

idaho that’s why we like to see what the original purpose was and then we will get it recycled then hopefully it turns into a new one yeah exactly and the other thing that’s in these facilities by with the abundance is all the copper wire yeah you know huge amounts of copper we got a lot of power yeah and i remember when we originally did the data center that i ran for a while when we did the original remodel we pulled out over 10 000 pounds of cat five yeah wired just this crazy yeah we’re just doing those in four by eight yeah just enough it’s like over and over and over yeah and then i don’t even remember how much pound pounds of mcm just here heavy the heavy gauge yeah there’s a bunch of that and what’s interesting though is then we had just as much fiber that we pulled out of that building and that’s what’s unfortunate i couldn’t find anywhere to recycle that no and that’s something that hopefully going forward as a you know as a recycling in the whole industry that we find a better recycler for fiber because

we’re finding more and more fiber optics in our stream like that i i’ll give it i’ll show the new guys like hey how much copper is in this no like ten percent like zero zero percent of copper like quit buying this but it’s becoming a problem and it’s crazy to me that there’s not really a good option for it at the moment the same with like we’re going to be going to a farm here at the end of this month for our show we’re going to go to hops farm they have plastic tubing they have a mountain of it they used to be able to yeah they used to be able to recycle it and just like all that stuff has been like kind of shut down because china refuses to recycle a lot of it now which is fine i can get it they want the high grade stuff now they want your coppers and things like that they’re like i’m done taking the world’s trash but it’s made the rest of the world really have to look at like how are we going to process this so hops farm well you need

to let me know when that happens because i know how that transitions into beer we’re going to agree we’re going to film the end of september and we’re going to we’re going to post it all right well we’re gonna go check it out inside cool let’s do it so we have the two uh authentications to get into the data center we have the key parts and then we have the biometrics scan okay to get into it because we have customers like i know supreme court we have banks in here we have hughes connect so we have some bigger guys that they have to in order for us to be soft one and two compliant we have to have those security measures i do have to go through a lot of protocol that say that compliant they got people come inspecting yeah yeah we have to do an audit every 12 months we you know uh in the recycling world they call it like r2 and r3 certification you have to recycle some of that material yeah and we downstream all of our east craft to those companies and that’s how we’re able to fall

under that umbrella because we say hey these guys that we’re gonna give it to are r2 certified but we we aren’t that’s quite the process yeah this is where the clouds are huh yeah so this is our cloud we just started building it uh two months ago we have some uh vms in the facility that are running back up and we have some that are doing a failover to our st george location so these racks right here this is just what we have for our vms so we have a few machines up and running vms meeting virtual machine so that those people who are running their infrastructure can do it via remotes they have vpns into their their front end location so they can run it from you know their desktop computer but all their stuff is here in our cloud how uh how long do you think these empty ones will stay empty do you plan for them to feel quick like how much does each one of these cabinets right as a sales rep i would say i want it full by you know this time next year yeah uh but in

reality probably 18 months okay so not that long though really before this this unit’s full right and then what do you have to buy and we’re going to get additional racks yeah you’ll keep building them until you run out of room correct okay that’s awesome then so you can see the power comes in here this is where all the power is distrib distributed out of yeah the video it goes up and feeds down to all of the racks so lots of recyclable items in that yeah and then so the way these guys get cooled because they do generate a lot of power because we’ve got air conditioning units like this a crack unit that is providing that condition there the cold air it gets dumped down under the floor and this is a false floor so there’s like at least a one foot if not two or three four 18 inches so 18 inches at this particular area but we’ll see them some that are three foot um so all that air comes down it’s basically used as ducting and then this is where the air comes up and out so you can feel

air and so all these servers sucking that air in and blowing it out so gotcha see here that we’ve got the floor you see now yeah and so all that just gets pulled right up into the unit and out the back i see some copper pipe right there upper right there yeah yeah lots of infrastructure and that must just be a magnet this is a suction cup it’s a suction cup okay so this is a wood top or like a laminate it’s like a laminate laminate then it’s concrete filled and then metal i think that’s a still yeah we’ve seen these before these are difficult yep but yeah yeah so they’re they’re heavy there’s a concrete one i think the newer ones are the concrete right yes the older ones are wood the wood ones yeah and then you got to think about it though uh you know these racks when they’re full are just crazy heavy so you imagine the amount of weight that all of these are holding and the pounds per square foot are is it’s rated very very very high yeah so then all that heat you know the it

pulls up everything’s designed when you load the racks that the airflow gets pulled in and then it gets shoved out the back correct so we have a we call it cool and hot aisles so on the cool aisle that’s the front of the machines that are sucking the air in okay and then the hot aisles where the hot air is getting blown out and it goes up into the circulation oh i see it so that’s on the brackets the hot oh yeah you can feel it it’s crazy that’s what’s happening like this you had hair at one point at one point okay i’m gonna find those pictures that’s what i want all right so you want to take a look at uh how these things get cooled off and then yeah let’s do it all right good so the difference between the air handler and a crack computer room air conditioner like you’ll see around here is this one uses chilled water so we’ve got the chillers outside they’re they’re cooling that water down and then we pump it through here and then it comes up and goes through a coil that’s cooled with

that chilled water and then there’s other units that’ll have compressors in here and refrigerant systems but let me just show you real quick what’s nice obviously on this what i do i geek out on this with these particular units they make it really easy for the technicians to work on um very well thought out yeah and able to maintain them and actually do repairs on them while keeping them running so you can see all the electrical in thank you got it so um you know the main power comes in and everything’s fused but if i lose um like some of the reheat i can turn off that portion of it get in here work on it while the system’s still moving air and take care of things so humidifiers fans there’s one big fan in here and they have variable frequency drives on it so we can keep the power usage low but like right now this guy is is cooling this is the cooling coil that chill water is coming through and i don’t know if you can see the light down there yeah that light is because we have a humidifier that’s

running um so we’re humidifying right now so and there is the recycling components like in our world we call this aluminum copper radiator yeah the way it sits you call it a triangle rad and it’s got tin size you know and then all like i’d say almost everything in here is recyclable yeah which is really cool and then there’s some big copper right here this is just an insulated copper line yep um that’s full of glycol you know it’s getting getting cooled down outside and then each one of them has a smoke detector this is sensing the air stream if there’s ever a fire obviously we’re really concerned about anything like that here so making sure that it’s all being monitored they really make that pretty easy to disassemble exactly easy to get to and work on some manufacturers are better than others as far as being able to work on this one has been around forever and they’ve done a great job of listening to field information coming back to their company and making design changes yeah so you guys have recycled lots of these from i know from our old facility that’s

a good question it’s uh so that’s gas suppression say that again it’s gas suppression yeah it’s gas suppression i don’t remember the chemical it’s uh but it’s some it’s like what’s in a fire extinguisher almost or not oh no no it’s like a gas yeah it’ll go off inside there and it just disperses all the oxygen but it doesn’t leave any residue like a carbon dioxide but it’s a chemical designed for fire suppression um damage your equipment correct wow so you don’t dump water that can’t be cheap no it’s not i don’t think anything these guys over here are pumps that are moving that chilled water that i was talking about and these are you can hear them running um these are on vfds so they change the speed of the pump depending on the demand in the building it’ll speed it up or slow it down and this is how we’re cooling a large portion of the floor in there and we’ll take a look at the chillers real quick and go from there so these are the chillers and again um huge amounts of recyclable material but this is where the refrigeration

portion of it is so we’re using the refrigeration system to cool glycol or liquid yeah and that’s what gets pumped out through does that run through the chiller barrel that’s in the middle of this yep yep so there’s a big big chiller bell right in the middle um so refrigerant on one side of the tiller barrel and the water on the other side that refrigerant removes the heat from that uh from that water and then we send it off through the other thing too is where that that energy gets absorbed into the refrigerant system and then it comes out to these big coils that you can definitely recycle a lot of aluminum and a lot of copper and that’s how we reject all the heat out to the atmosphere yep that’s absorbed from inside there on the floor so we love recycling these chiller barrels because like nine out of 10 times they’re full of copper tubes yeah i’ve seen them with steel tubes i’ve seen them with stainless tubes before some older ones yeah those are old ones but all the newer stuff all copper too on copper tubes steel shell but just

a big bundle and they’re not really easy to process but but we’ve kind of we’ve learned the best process from just many different ways so we know how to break those down pretty pretty quickly now yep yeah there’s a lot of weight here oh yeah they’re so i mean you got to get a crane to get them get them in here and then turn it around you can see that there’s here’s two of the generators for making sure they don’t lose power here oh okay yeah so what happens is if we lose power which we never have uh there’ll be we have a few machines inside called uh ups’s and what those do is they excuse me not ups uh and they like uh dudes power destruction power distribution unit that goes to so if we have a power down they’ll pick up all the power inside until these kick on and what these do is they hold the power load and make sure the facility continues running and they’re actually running on diesel we have a diesel contract where a diesel company will come in and keep refilling it until the electricity gets

kicked back on so that way you have a truck just coming back keeps on coming until the power comes back on so that way all of our customers don’t lose power they don’t lose internet they don’t lose any of their stuff this is cool you have that infrastructure in place yeah you’re not just with the actual building but like with your you know with other people so what that means on our data center side that means we’re redundant we’re redundant in power we’re redundant in backups and the more redundant you are the safer location is to house your data okay so it makes sense and then with those uh pdus and the ups’s those batteries remember all those batteries that we recycle those huge yeah oh yeah yeah those are in there yeah those help hold that load so when you know idaho power’s offline for that short period of time they design those systems so that okay how much load how much power is being used in that facility how long do we need to keep it they designed those battery systems around that to give you time for these guys to come

on and supplement that power yeah and those in in the recycling industry that’s the industrial lead acid battery is what we call those they’re awesome oh they’re they’re good they’re heavy all right all right now so these uh are rooftop units they called you know rtu’s they’re heating and cooling um there’s a whole bunch on the roof here so like this one here takes care of one of the power rooms okay so you know we don’t need the critical condition there as far as humidified or dehumidified but we need to keep it cool so all of those power distribution units and the ups’s generate a lot of heat so we’ve got a lot of power equipment rooms that we’re using these for and this is a new one we replaced this one this year okay um so all of these are getting older and as they get there um we’ll replace them how long do they last about 20 years i mean that’s about the age of these guys yep uh tonic quinn was not john point conquering boise originally known as fiber pipe was built in 2000 so yeah 20 years 20 years

ago and these and the you know the ones for the power rooms these guys run 24 7 365 so even the middle of winter these guys are running cooling the place down um we have the and so we recycled you got the old one went straight to your place and went through it so um the other thing too is these are lightning rods oh okay i was wondering what that was yeah so if you look around everywhere around here um okay it’s all because it’s the data center if we have a lightning strike we want it to go here not to the facility so talk about some recyclable copper here yeah i don’t think i’ve ever really noticed these uh on a roof before yeah i’m sure i bid on one where they’re there but this is the first time i’ve ever like really realized what those were there’s a lot of uh a lot of copper sitting up there oh yeah but then the other cool thing is we’ve got economizers on these so like i said it’s got to cool all winter long too but we got these guys that are called

economizers so it’s an automated damper when the outside air is colder than the inside and we can use friction to use the air these automatically open up and pull the fresh air in and cool it that way and then we supplement the mechanical cooling do they have like a residential unit that does that that has that we do they’re they do yeah it’s a lot more involved because a rooftop unit everything is right here right the furnace the air conditioner the blower so we and it’s sitting outside so we can introduce outside air at your house typically your furnace is inside maybe the garage or something like that yeah and all the air is in there so for us to get that economizer and bring that air in there’s a lot of work to it got it yeah but they’re getting it simpler and simpler to be able to do i’ve always thought of that i was like i was like that would be cool if like for me i thought it’d be cool if all my windows were automated or they all like like cracked open like four inches and then i had

like a vent that sucked all the air out that’s called the whole house fan and we can do that can you do that all right we might have to talk after those are popular in manufactured houses yeah are they okay the problem with it is it doesn’t know if it’s smoky or not out or what’s going on like right now like right now so a lot of times you know they’re opening up because it’s cooler out and flooding the the building with outside air and it’s smoking you know so that’s can you turn that off you can disable it yeah but you got to get up here and you got it you got to manually do it okay so over here though remember i was talking about we’ve got some of those computer units that work off those chillers that we saw yeah some of them have their own refrigerant systems built into it um and that’s what these are doing here this is a remote condenser so like when we’re looking at that chiller the big coils on the outside part of that chiller that’s how that rejected its energy from the data

center all of the crack units that are downstairs in the data center that have their own refrigerant system all of that energy is getting absorbed in that refrigerant system it comes up here and this is how we dissipate all of that heat okay to the atmosphere and these are just huge coils yeah you look up underneath they’re just massive coils oh yeah the whole thing yeah full of refrigerant and copper piping all the way through we got eight electric motors running so a lot of a lot of copper though that’s hot that’s discharged okay awesome man that’s my favorite part of my job is i get to go to all these different industries and like learn a little bit like about all of them like how it kind of all works you know and like my kids they love that show uh how it’s made oh yeah i do yeah and we watch it all the time i tell them all the time like that’s kind of what i do like i gotta go around you know i’m usually going around uh checking out stuff to figure out how i could help on the

recycling plan you know on a long-term recycling plant um i’ve been doing this for 10 years but i just recently started videotaping it you know so yeah yeah it’s cool i mean i dig this because i mean obviously data centers and buildings but the data center with the cooling needs um in my industry i mean i’ve been doing for a long time there’s there’s so many different things that we get to do as a heating and air conditioning contractor from the refrigerant piping to a we do a lot of electrical um you know the gas piping sheet metal we do you know construction yeah we get to do a little bit of all of it and it’s it’s just awesome i mean i love it you can completely go to all the different industries too because they all need something exactly so get to see all kinds of stuff cool cool man well thank you this is awesome i really appreciate it thank you thank you for taking the time man i’ll be a missed if i don’t say hey if you guys need something for your heating and air conditioning call fox

eating and cooling because we’ll take it call this guy if you need any technicians that need places to put servers call me we got them if you need a scrap right here thank you for listening to another episode of recycled idaho and as we continue the journey across this great state we look forward to bringing you more stories of people and organizations putting in the work to do the right thing