I did this for a short time. Besides the dangerous swings in temperature which I think should be avoided if possible I had huge issues with spiders and insects.

Rhuwyn wrote:

I did this for a short time. Besides the dangerous swings in temperature which I think should be avoided if possible I had huge issues with spiders and insects.

Same here. Storage in our attic was fine, though. We had a lot of old books and electronics stored there.
For many years, and in cardboard boxes..

Yeah that's kind of what I figured. The thermal stresses alone are probably enough to do damage over even a short time frame (year or less).
Seeing as how it can get down to minus 40 F in the winter and up to 100 F in the summer in my area (and the 90% humidity this summer made it absolutely unbearable) I am probably safer storing everything inside and just narrowing down or selling/giving away some of the bulkier things from my collection.

I will have to leave the garage to wood-working and motorcycle repair I think.

I stored a heap of floppies in a plastic container in my garage, and most of them were unusable after a couple of years. However I lived near the beach and we had some seriously hot and humid days in summer, which may have contributed.

Rhuwyn wrote:

Besides the dangerous swings in temperature which I think should be avoided if possible I had huge issues with spiders and insects.

Personally, I'd be concerned about rodents. I've found a nest or three in my own garage and those little buggers can chew through anything. Nothing quite like opening a computer case to find it's home to a family of mice. 😵

I operated out of a garage for 2 years, but it was in great shape with an A/C unit and good rubber gaskets under the garage doors, proper drywall with tape and bedding. It worked quite well, but again it wasn't an average garage.

Have you considered a shed in the back yard, with power ran to it, with an AC unit for the summer, and a Smithfield Pentium D with an HD2900XT for heating in the winter.

candle_86 wrote:

I operated out of a garage for 2 years, but it was in great shape with an A/C unit and good rubber gaskets under the garage doors, proper drywall with tape and bedding. It worked quite well, but again it wasn't an average garage.

Have you considered a shed in the back yard, with power ran to it, with an AC unit for the summer, and a Smithfield Pentium D with an HD2900XT for heating in the winter.

If he lived were I do he would need 4 dual core netburst xeon's or 2 480 or 2 295. 🤣

All of my consoles and most of my computers are in a non-climate-controlled storage unit right now...

...I've sort of been bracing myself for the fact that when I finally have access to all of it again, a lot of it might not work right or at all anymore, but given the really stupid things that went down around the end of 2014, there was no avoiding this and there's not enough space where I'm living now to bring any of it out. :(

From what I understand from the conversations I've had with techs in our local pinball league about storing things, the electronic aspect of these things should be fine, but anything of a mechanical nature is going to be hit or miss depending on how resilient it is to moisture/temperature. I'm expecting my older consoles and game carts will likely still work but that the ones with disc readers like my Wii or PS2 may not.

The thing is, I have to be capable of affording my own place before I'll have the space to pull all of my stuff from storage and while I'm definitely getting closer to that point, I'm not there quite yet. (About 1/3 of the way there.)

I live in Colorado. Nothing rusts, things just dry out. UV damage is huge, but only if you leave things sitting in windows.

Oh, where in Colorado are you? I'm in Boulder 😎

NE Denver, almost to Brighton. So rodents are a huge thing too. I use the "5-gallon bucket trap" to keep them at bay.

Im cuorious about his topic too. I recently had to buy an older mobile sales trailer thats approx 5x2m. Put up a lot of shelves inside for storing stuff including many of my computers and parts. We have a very dry climate here, but winters can be cold and sometimes down to -30c degrees. Im a little worried that maybe some can get damaged in the winter thats coming. The temperatures are not fluctuating a lot and are somewhat stabile during the winter. Should i have some heating inside the trailer? Walls, floor, roof etc are made of some sandwich compostion that maybe insulate a bit.

In a perfect world, all stuff would be stored at room temperature, in the dark at some set humidity. Obviously thats not practical.

Keep the rare, expensive stuff inside, put the relativly common cheap stuff outside. That boxed video card stays inside, the spare desktop case, out.

Long story short, use common sense here.

Scraphoarder wrote:

Im cuorious about his topic too. I recently had to buy an older mobile sales trailer thats approx 5x2m. Put up a lot of shelves inside for storing stuff including many of my computers and parts. We have a very dry climate here, but winters can be cold and sometimes down to -30c degrees. Im a little worried that maybe some can get damaged in the winter thats coming. The temperatures are not fluctuating a lot and are somewhat stabile during the winter. Should i have some heating inside the trailer? Walls, floor, roof etc are made of some sandwich compostion that maybe insulate a bit.

Somewhat contrary to logic heating would be bad in the winter for your outdoors trailer. Heating produces vaporization which then produces condensation on your computer parts. It needs to be ventilated AND heated.

A lot of my stuff spent 5+ years untouched in my parents garage in Australia, and just put in cardbox boxes, some stuff in anti static bags but mostly just loose, average temperatures ranges from 11 to 22 (roughly)
I was pleasantly surprised to find most things worked fine, bit of surface rust, a lot of dust and cob webs but otherwise fine