Specifying ventilation for metal electronic enclosures

Cooling the enclosures that house your electronics can be costly. Often it means specifying fans (and then the additional costs for their installation). Those costs are passed on to your customers…who then must also foot the ongoing energy bills.

Free-flow ventilation can often be a more cost effective solution for many applications. But even then that’s not really free – not if you have to invest time (and therefore money) in the CNC machining the ventilation slots yourself.

The solution is to specify enclosures with standard ventilation, or have METCASE pre-punch all the ventilation slots, and mounting holes for fans if necessary, when the enclosures are first made.

For 19” rack cases the choice is easy. COMBIMET 19" is the choice for rack mount cases with ventilation as standard. The cases can also be supplied with any type of ventilation matrix or fan mountings you specify.

COMBIMET Ventilated 19” Rack Cases

Bestselling COMBIMET (1U-6U) rack mount enclosures are available with a choice of possible ventilation options as standard:

• vented top and base
• Version T open tray (sizes 2U and 3U)
• Custom specification ventilation slot matrix and/or fan mountings to order.

Compared with our other 19” enclosure ranges (METTEC, UNIMET and VERSAMET), COMBIMET offers the largest number of standard heights and widths…and in three depths: 10.43", 14.37" and now new 24" deep versions for server racks type applications.

Need cooling fans after all? Size 3U upwards is large enough to mount a 4.72" fan (requiring a 4.5”/114.3 mm cutout) in one of the side panels. Or for 1U or 2U you could mount the fan in the base or top.

Simply choose your enclosure, download a 3D model (by first registering as a user) then specify where you would like the fan aperture – our CNC machining team will do the rest.

Instrument Enclosures With Ventilation

METCASE desktop and portable instrument enclosures are also available with ventilation either as standard or to special order. Technomet and Instrumet 19” enclosures are available with vented base and rear panels as standard.

And for the non-vented standard enclosures? Customization is a simple matter – especially if you download 3D models to speed up the specification process.

3D drawings are available for all METCASE enclosures to make the process quicker and more cost effective. Specify ventilation along with your other holes and cutouts and we’ll supply your enclosures ready for your PCBs, switches, potentiometers, connectors and other components.

All METCASE instrument enclosures can be specified in custom widths. Virtually all (except UNIDESK) are also available in custom depths. UNICASE and new TECHNOMET are available in custom heights, widths and depths.

View enclosures range >>