Protecting IT Equipment during refurbishment | UK

Protecting IT Equipment – ProtectIT™ System

Stop Construction Dust Before It Damages Your Critical IT Infrastructure. Protecting IT Equipment – ProtectIT™ System

Protecting IT Equipment during refurbishment or retrofit projects, one of the greatest — and most underestimated — threats to your data centre or server room is construction dust.
These microscopic particles are abrasive, conductive, and highly damaging to sensitive IT components such as fans, circuit boards, and power supplies.

The Hidden Threat: Construction Dust

Refurbishment work produces vast quantities of fine particulate contamination.
The most harmful types come from:

Silica-based dust (from concrete, mortar, sandstone, etc.)
Low-toxicity dusts (from plaster and plasterboard)

These particles are incredibly small — often as fine as 0.3 μm (0.0003 mm) — and can travel freely through the air and ventilation systems. Once inside IT equipment, they block airways, cause overheating, and accelerate wear on moving parts such as cooling fans and drives.

Why Traditional Protection Fails

Contractors rarely understand how sub-micron particles behave.
Even when they attempt to isolate work areas, microscopic dust can bypass makeshift barriers and spread through positive-pressure airflow systems into data halls.

Plaster dust is particularly dangerous.
It has a critical relative humidity lower than the environment in most data centres, meaning it absorbs moisture from the air and becomes damp.
This leads to:

Corrosion (sulphur and copper creep)
Ionic migration (changes in polarity on circuit boards)
Permanent electronic damage

If you’ve ever entered a room with plaster dust and noticed your mouth dry out — that’s the same moisture-absorption process damaging your IT equipment.

Our Solution: ProtectIT™ – IT Equipment Protection System

IT Cleaning Ltd.’s ProtectIT™ System provides a proven method to protect live IT environments during construction or refurbishment.

How it works:

Enclose the IT equipment or the work area using our specialist containment systems.
Use HEPA-filtered air scrubbers to generate positive or negative air pressure:
- Positive pressure – keeps dust out of the protected IT equipment zone.
- Negative pressure – traps dust inside the construction zone, preventing migration.
Monitor air quality and temperature in real time to ensure stable, safe operating conditions.
Take air particulate readings in both the clean and work areas to prove the system’s effectiveness.

This method ensures your critical servers, storage, and network hardware remain operational and dust-free while construction proceeds safely around them.

Proven Results Across the UK

Our ProtectIT™ system has successfully safeguarded:

Large enterprise data halls
High-density server rooms
Sensitive communications and control rooms

Example: Protecting a large tape library using positive air pressure to ensure dust from the “dirty” construction zone cannot reach the clean IT environment.

“Contamination has been the indirect cause of more IT downtime than all the fires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and disgruntled employees combined.”
— Jon William Toigo, Disaster Recovery Planning (3rd Edition)

“Perhaps the most important step to control contamination is to contract with a reputable computer room maintenance company to perform routine cleaning.”
— John William Toigo, Disaster Recovery Planning (3rd Edition)

After the Work Is Complete

Once refurbishment is finished, IT Cleaning Ltd will:

Perform a comprehensive post-works clean
Test and certify the environment to ISO 14644-1:2015 Class 8
Provide a Certificate of Conformity for audit and compliance purposes

If your IT equipment has already been exposed to dust, we also offer internal server and component cleaning services to restore performance and prevent future failure.

Contact Us

Protect your mission-critical environment before refurbishment begins.
Contact Stephen Yates for expert advice or a free assessment:

Call: 07810 893218

Mail: stephen.yates@itcleaning.co.uk
Web: www.itcleaning.co.uk

Protecting a large tape library using positive air pressure. To ensure dust from dirty area can not move into clean protected area.

“IT Cleaning Ltd Magazine Article published in Cleanroom Technology

“We have used this our IT Equipment Protection system in Data Rooms, Comms Rooms and even Broadcasting Apps Rooms. To date, it has worked every time. No contamination of the protected IT equipment has occurred.” Stephen Yates MD.

While Protecting IT Equipment we can supply a manager to manage control of the contamination. Such as egress into and out of the space,….using air lock doors. Provide HEPA filtered vacuums for use by the contractors. Monitoring Particulate levels within the protected space. Maintaining pressures, air scrubbers and temperature.

After the construction work is finished we will technically clean any areas that require cleaning. Provide air particulate reading to prove the room and work areas are safe, then remove the enclosure. Handing the whole room back to the IT or Data Centre Manager. We will use the air particulate level class 8 from ISO 14644 which allows 3,520,000 particles at 0.5μm, 832,000 at 1μm and 29,300 at 5μm. For information on particle sizes click here What Makes up Sub Micron Particles

We are able to enclose the work/clean area. Using HEPA filtered air scrubbers we will create a negative/positive pressure within the areas. This will ensure the dust is unable to migrate from or into the enclosure depending on which way around we are doing the system. What particles do HEPA filters filter.

Thermac NPU Air-Scrubbers 0.3µm Air Scrubbers will filter 2500m3 of air per hour. They are used to clean particulate which is forced airborne during cleaning so it can not resettle. We also use them to create a positive or negative pressure in an enclosure so the dust can not escape into the environment.
This IT Protection System system is used when construction work is taking place near to areas or equipment that needs to remain free from dust. IT Equipment is very susceptible to silica based construction dust these are very abrasive and produced in large quantities, causing breakdowns and over heating. Protecting IT Equipment using this system is very effective.

Before and After

Stephen Yates

Protecting IT Equipment – ProtectIT™ System

For a free site survey and quotation or further information please contact Stephen Yates 0870 0052581 or stephen.yates@itcleaning.co.uk

For a free site survey, report and quote please contact us