Keeping your home stereo in a cabinet helps with noise and protects your equipment from pets and kids. Game consoles, receivers, and STBs don’t work well in saunas; so here’s how to keep your entertainment center cool automatically.

Heat is one of the quickest ways you can kill electronics. Most home theater equipment is designed to be cooled passively, but being enclosed in a cabinet does not allow for the proper amount of airflow. Weather you’re on your third RRoD Xbox 360 or your PS3 is getting too loud, keeping your home theater gear cooled ensures long life and quiet operation.

There are a couple of commercial products that can help with cooling but most of them are either too expensive or don’t turn on/off automatically.

The Antec Veris has a neat design and functions well for one device, but at $70-$100 and having to manually turn it on/off doesn’t make it ideal for the lazy few of us who want to watch our movies in silence.

You can get something cheaper with the Thermaltake Mobile Fan II which only costs $12-$20 and has variable speeds. But it uses USB for power and unless you have a HTPC you may be short on USB ports in your cabinet.

A few companies make kits to easily mount fans in your cabinet but they usually cost $100+ and don’t typically come with an easy way to turn the system on or off.

So we decided to take matters into our own hands and show you the best automatically cooled home entertainment kit we could come up with. Let’s start with a video showing your how the system will work.

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