Industry Solutions / Warehousing and Logistics

Cooling and UPS Protection for Australian Distribution Centres, 3PL and Cold Chain Logistics

If you searched for warehouse cooling because your pickers are working in 41 degrees under a Colorbond roof in February, the honest answer is that you need airflow, insulation and evaporative or misting plant, and there are good Australian suppliers of exactly that. We are not one of them, and we will say so on the phone rather than sell you something that does not fit.

What we do is the far smaller, far more expensive room tucked into the corner of that same building. Inside it sit the warehouse management system servers, the network core, the RF controllers, the PLC cabinets coordinating the conveyors and sorters, and the UPS keeping all of it alive. That room is typically 12 to 30 square metres, carries 3 kW to 25 kW of continuous heat load, and if it goes down the entire 25,000 square metre facility around it stops. Nobody picks, nobody scans, nothing ships. The value at risk is wildly out of proportion to the size of the room, and it is almost always the least engineered part of the site.

Indigi Power and Cooling is an Indigenous and Veteran owned critical power and cooling specialist, registered with Supply Nation and ICN Gateway. We work across distribution centres, third party logistics operations, cold chain and refrigerated warehousing, freight terminals and e-commerce fulfilment sites nationally, from Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne hubs.

The argument for protecting this equipment is not the one most vendors make. Everybody says downtime is expensive. That is true and it is also useless, because it does not tell you what actually breaks. The table below does.

Cooling the shed and cooling the equipment are two different projects

This distinction is the single most useful thing on this page, and almost nothing else ranking for warehouse cooling in Australia makes it. The pages you will find are selling high-volume low-speed fans, misting rings and evaporative units, all of which are legitimate products for the problem they solve. None of them mention the room that runs the building.

The warehouse floor: a ventilation problem

Cooling an open warehouse volume with refrigerated air conditioning is generally uneconomic. A large shed has enormous air volume, a roof absorbing direct sun, and dock doors that spend the working day open. The realistic controls are the ones the ventilation suppliers describe accurately: roof and wall insulation, reflective roofing, dock seals and shelters, high-volume low-speed fans to destratify and move air at floor level, roof extraction to purge accumulated hot air, night purging, and evaporative or misting plant for spot relief in fixed workstations. Evaporative cooling works well in dry inland conditions and poorly in Brisbane, Darwin or coastal humidity, which is a distinction the product marketing tends to skip.

Refrigerated air conditioning becomes worth the money only where you enclose a space: the pick module mezzanine office, the QA bench, the returns area, the amenities block. Enclose first, then cool. Cooling an unenclosed area in a warehouse is money leaving through the roof.

The rooms inside the shed: a precision cooling problem

The comms room, MDF, control room and UPS room are different in kind, not degree. They need close control of temperature, controlled humidity, filtration appropriate to a dusty building, and continuous operation at a fixed setpoint regardless of the season or the time of day. That is precision cooling, and it is what we design, install, commission and maintain. See server room cooling Australia and switchroom cooling for the underlying service detail.

Why the recovery cost, not the outage, is the real argument

A modern distribution centre is not a building with some equipment in it. It is a single coordinated machine, and the coordination lives in software and controllers rather than in the mechanical hardware. That changes what an outage means.

When a line of unautomated pallet racking loses power, work pauses and then resumes. Nothing is lost but time. When an automated facility loses power, even briefly, it does not pause in a clean state. It stops in an indeterminate one. The sorter does not know which totes were between the scan point and the chute. The ASRS crane does not know where it is in the aisle. The WMS may have written half of a multi-step transaction. Print and apply may have printed a label that was never applied to the carton it belonged to.

Recovering from that is a manual, sequential, error-prone job. Somebody walks the line and clears it physically. Somebody re-homes the cranes. Somebody reconciles the WMS against what is actually on the shelf. On a large site this routinely runs longer than the outage that caused it, by a wide margin, and it is followed by days of downstream inventory accuracy problems and short-shipped orders. A five second brownout can cost a full shift.

That asymmetry is the entire argument for a UPS in a warehouse. You are not buying ride-through so the site keeps running through a blackout. You are buying a clean state. The UPS holds the intelligence up long enough that when the power comes back, the system knows what it was doing and can restart in an orderly sequence rather than a forensic one. In many designs 5 to 15 minutes of runtime is enough, because the objective is a controlled shutdown or a bridge to the generator, not sustained operation.

Where the UPS goes, and where it does not

Being clear about what should not be on UPS matters as much as knowing what should. Putting the wrong things on protected power produces a system that is enormous, expensive, inefficient and no more resilient.

• On the UPS: WMS and control servers, the network core and edge switching, RF controllers and access points, PLC and control cabinets for the material handling system, print and apply controllers, refrigeration monitoring and BMS, security, access control and CCTV head end, and the comms room cooling.
• Not on the UPS: conveyor and sorter drive motors, ASRS crane drives, dock levellers, compressor plant, HVLS fans and general lighting. These are large inductive loads with high starting currents. They belong behind a generator with correctly staged soft starting, and sizing a UPS to carry them is a design mistake we are regularly asked to correct.
• The judgement call: emergency and egress lighting, which is usually covered separately under the building's own emergency lighting provisions, and the forklift and AGV charging bank, which is discussed below.

Typical sizing for a mid-sized Australian distribution centre lands between 10 kVA and 40 kVA of protected load once the servers, network, controls and comms room cooling are totalled correctly. That is a three-phase online double-conversion system in most cases. Smaller 3PL and freight depot sites often sit at 3 kVA to 10 kVA and are properly served single phase. We size from a measured load, not a nameplate tally, because nameplate addition in a warehouse routinely overstates real draw by 40 per cent or more and you end up paying for a frame you will never load.

The comms room in a steel shed is a harder environment than a data centre

A purpose-built data hall is a benign place. It is insulated, sealed, filtered, and sits inside a building designed around the equipment. A warehouse MDF room is none of those things, and the equipment inside it is doing the same job.

Diurnal swing

An uninsulated or lightly insulated steel building tracks the outside temperature and then adds to it. Roof cavity temperatures well above 50 degrees Celsius are ordinary on a hot Australian afternoon, and the small room built into the corner of that structure inherits the load through its ceiling and shared walls. Overnight the same building dumps heat rapidly. The result is a cooling load that swings enormously across 24 hours, which is exactly the condition that makes a fixed-speed comfort split cycle badly, short cycle, and fail early. Inverter-driven precision units with proper turndown handle it. A wall-hung comfort split does not, and its compressor will tell you so within a couple of summers.

Dust and filtration

Forklift traffic, cardboard dust, pallet debris and shrink wrap fibre are constant in a working warehouse, and the comms room door opens dozens of times a day. That particulate gets into filters, coils and eventually server fans and switch intakes. Precision cooling units carry serviceable filtration designed for continuous duty and regular replacement, which a comfort split does not. Filter and coil hygiene in a mechanically ventilated space falls under AS/NZS 3666, and in a dusty environment the practical service interval is materially shorter than the manufacturer's default. Positive room pressure and sealing cable penetrations are cheap measures that pay back quickly.

Humidity and setpoint

ASHRAE TC 9.9 gives a recommended envelope of 18 to 27 degrees Celsius at the equipment inlet, with an allowable range wider than that. Comfort air conditioning is designed to control the temperature a person feels in a room, not the temperature of the air actually entering a switch or server. It also tends to over-dehumidify or under-dehumidify because humidity is incidental to its purpose. In a coastal Australian warehouse the humidity end of this matters, particularly where the room shares a wall with a refrigerated area and condensation risk is real.

Redundancy in a room with one unit

Most warehouse comms rooms have a single cooling unit. When it fails, and it will, the room has no cooling at all until somebody attends. Two smaller units in an N+1 arrangement with automatic changeover and rotation costs modestly more than one large unit and removes the single point of failure entirely. It also lets you service one unit without shutting the room down, which is the difference between planned maintenance and an outage. This is the most common recommendation we make on a warehouse site survey.

Cold chain logistics, refrigerated warehousing and reefer connections

Cold chain sites carry a different exposure. In a dry goods facility a power event costs you a shift. In refrigerated warehousing or a reefer yard it can cost you the freight.

The Food Standards Code requires potentially hazardous food to be held at 5 degrees Celsius or below, and frozen product to remain frozen hard. Temperature-sensitive medicines and vaccines are held at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius under TGA cold chain expectations, with excursions requiring documented assessment before product can be released. Neither of those is a target you meet on average. They are conditions you have to demonstrate you maintained continuously, with records.

That last word is the point that gets underestimated. The refrigeration plant itself is nearly always on the generator, and correctly so. The data loggers, the monitoring gateway, the network link carrying alarms and the BMS front end frequently are not. So the plant rides through on the generator while the evidence trail goes dark for the ten minutes that matter most, and you are left unable to prove what happened inside the cool room during the event. For an audited cold chain operation, continuity of monitoring is a compliance requirement in its own right, separate from continuity of refrigeration, and it is cheap to protect because the load is tiny. A small single-phase UPS on the monitoring stack solves it.

Reefer connection points on the hardstand deserve the same scrutiny. A yard full of refrigerated containers on shore power represents a very large connected load, and the switchboard, changeover and alarm arrangements around it are worth inspecting properly. If your operation moves pharmaceutical freight, our pharmaceutical cleanroom HVAC and cold chain page covers the storage and handling end of the same chain in more detail.

Forklift and AGV charging infrastructure

Electric materials handling equipment is a growing and frequently unplanned load. A site converting a diesel or LPG forklift fleet to lithium, or introducing autonomous mobile robots with opportunity charging, can add tens of kilowatts of charging demand to a switchboard that was never sized for it, often concentrated into shift changeover periods. Charging banks do not belong on UPS, but they very much belong in the load study, and lead-acid charging areas carry hydrogen ventilation obligations that need to be designed rather than assumed. Where a battery or charging room is enclosed, gas detection is worth engineering properly. See gas detection for battery rooms.

Australian compliance that actually applies here

Four requirements do real work on a warehouse project, and we would rather name those four accurately than decorate the page with a list.

• AS/NZS 3000. All electrical installation work, including UPS input and output distribution, maintenance bypass arrangements, changeover to generator and the charging infrastructure switchboard.
• ARCtick licensing. Any work handling refrigerant, whether on precision cooling in the comms room or refrigeration plant, requires a licence under the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Regulations. Ask to see it. On warehouse sites we are asked for it less often than we should be.
• AS/NZS 3666. Air handling and water systems hygiene, which is what drives filter and coil servicing discipline in a dusty building rather than leaving it to whenever someone notices the room is warm.
• ASHRAE TC 9.9. Not an Australian standard and not mandatory, but the reference the entire industry designs to for equipment inlet conditions, and the number your hardware vendor will quote back at you during a warranty conversation.

What Indigi does on a warehouse or distribution centre site

Indicative pricing: comms room and server room cooling design and installation runs $8,000 to $15,000 for small rooms, $25,000 to $45,000 for medium installations and $45,000 to $60,000 plus for large or multi-room projects. Single-phase UPS installation starts from $850 up to 3 kVA, $1,250 for 3 to 10 kVA and $1,800 for 10 to 20 kVA. Three-phase installation starts from $3,200 for small systems and $6,500 for medium. UPS maintenance is $720 ex GST for a one-off visit, or $1,940 per year ex GST on a standard annual plan. Multi-site 3PL operators are quoted as a portfolio, which is normally better value than site by site.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best way to cool down a warehouse?

For the open warehouse floor, the effective measures are roof and wall insulation, reflective roofing, dock seals and shelters, high-volume low-speed fans to destratify air and move it at floor level, roof extraction to purge hot air, night purging, and evaporative or misting plant where the climate is dry enough to suit it. Refrigerated air conditioning of the whole volume is rarely economic. For enclosed spaces inside the warehouse, particularly the comms room, control room and any office areas, the answer is different: those need properly sized air conditioning, and the equipment rooms need precision cooling rather than comfort units.

Can a warehouse be air conditioned?

Technically yes, and in cold storage and some pharmaceutical or food facilities the entire volume is conditioned as a matter of necessity. For a general dry goods warehouse it is usually uneconomic, because the air volume is very large, the roof gains heat all day and the dock doors are open. The normal Australian approach is to condition enclosed areas only, meaning offices, mezzanine pick modules, QA benches, amenities and equipment rooms, and to control the open floor with ventilation, insulation and air movement instead.

Which AC is best for a warehouse?

It depends entirely on which part of the warehouse. For the open floor, evaporative cooling suits dry inland climates and performs poorly in humid coastal conditions, where high-volume low-speed fans and extraction do more. For enclosed office and amenity areas, standard ducted or split systems are appropriate. For the comms room, MDF, control room or UPS room, a comfort split is the wrong choice: those need a precision or close control unit with tight temperature control, humidity management, serviceable filtration for a dusty building and continuous duty operation.

What are the four types of cooling?

In a warehouse context the four practical categories are active cooling, which removes heat mechanically using refrigerated air conditioning or precision units; evaporative cooling, which uses water evaporation to drop air temperature and works only where humidity is low enough; heat removal and ventilation, which extracts accumulated hot air and brings in outside air; and preventative or passive measures, which stop heat entering at all through insulation, reflective roofing, shading and dock sealing. A well-designed Australian warehouse uses all four in different zones, with mechanical precision cooling reserved for the equipment rooms.

Do server rooms need cooling?

Yes, and warehouse comms rooms need it more than most because they sit inside an uninsulated steel building. Heat builds up faster in a small sealed room than in a large data hall, since there is very little thermal mass to absorb it. A warehouse MDF room typically carries 3 kW to 25 kW of continuous heat load in 12 to 30 square metres, with additional heat gain through the ceiling and shared walls from a roof cavity that can exceed 50 degrees Celsius on a hot day. Without dedicated cooling, that room will exceed safe operating temperature within minutes of the cooling stopping.

How cold should it be in a server room?

ASHRAE TC 9.9 recommends 18 to 27 degrees Celsius measured at the equipment inlet, not at a wall thermostat or in the middle of the room. Most Australian sites target the middle of that band, around 22 to 24 degrees Celsius, which gives useful thermal headroom if cooling fails without wasting energy running colder than necessary. Relative humidity should be controlled to avoid condensation at the low end and static risk at the high end. Running a room colder than 18 degrees Celsius achieves nothing except a larger power bill.

What happens if a server room gets too hot?

Equipment begins throttling itself to protect its components, so performance degrades before anything visibly fails. Fans run harder, drawing more power and pulling more dust through the room. Past the thermal limit, servers and switches shut down to protect themselves, which in a warehouse means the WMS, the network and the RF infrastructure all stop at once and the floor stops with them. Sustained heat also shortens equipment life and degrades UPS batteries significantly, since valve-regulated lead-acid battery life roughly halves for every 10 degrees Celsius above 25 degrees. There is also a genuine fire risk in an overheated, dust-loaded room.

Where we work

Related services and industries

• Server room cooling Australia for the comms room and MDF
• Switchroom cooling for control and electrical rooms
• CRAC installation and commissioning
• CRAC unit maintenance services
• Three phase UPS installation and commissioning for larger automated sites
• Single phase UPS installation for depots and monitoring stacks
• UPS maintenance plans scheduled around your peak season
• Battery maintenance and replacement
• High temperature UPS systems for uncooled plant and dock areas
• Power integrity inspection if you are seeing unexplained resets
• Industrial and manufacturing for production line switchrooms
• Pharmaceutical cleanroom HVAC and cold chain for temperature-controlled freight
• Retail and commercial for the store network your DC supplies
• UPS, battery and CRAC FAQ

Protecting a distribution centre, 3PL site or cold store? Tell us the comms room dimensions, what is in the rack, whether you run sortation or ASRS, and what is currently on backup power. We will come back with a measured heat load, a protected load schedule and an installed price. Indigi Power and Cooling is Indigenous and Veteran owned, and registered with Supply Nation and ICN Gateway. Contact Indigi Power and Cooling Server Room Cooling