The Raritan Blog

New ASHRAE Study Will Encourage Data Centers to Operate at a Lower Relative Humidity

Mike Donoghue
April 8, 2015

For the last several years, ASHRAE has been advocating that data centers allow temperatures to rise in order to save money on cooling resources.  Now, an upcoming study will assert that data centers save even further by allowing humidity to drop to an RH of 8 percent.

In a recent interview with Data Center Dynamics, Dan Beaty, Cofounder of ASHRAE’s TC 9.9 said, “We ran a test with different types of floor tiles and clothing, and we found that between eight percent and 20-25 percent, the difference in static electricity is insignificant.”