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