Somewhat tangential, but in my first NYC apartment, our radiator was absolutely terrible, and did a miserable job getting the living room to an even remotely livable temperature.<p>My solution? Two giant rack mount servers, running Foldign@Home at full capacity. Way I figured is that it's still 100% efficient at generating heat, but I might as well help drug research in the process.
I'm highly skeptical this thing can provide enough heat energy to warm an entire water tank and keep it warm for the sporadic on-demand loads a hot water tank typically endures. Will it take 3 days to warm back up after a moderately long hot shower while simultaneously running the dishwasher?<p>I'm further skeptical at the claim of a dedicated fiber line being installed just for this server (having been on the receiving side of fiber install quotes with 5-6 digits) - and even more skeptical at the claim of using 4G/5G connections for servers.<p>I'll believe it when I see it... but it reads like it was written by someone that really doesn't have a grasp of what we're dealing with here.
Worth remembering that you don't need the server to completely heat the water to shower temperature. You can get it part way there, and then it will take less heat to get the water heater the rest of the way.<p>I could imagine a future where every house has something like this partially heating their water and air before the real heating system is applied.
This could be flipped - I.e. using a Japanese domestic fuel cell[1] one could install a hot water heater in the home, and get 'free' electricity to run a server, that could possibly do something productive to offset the associated capital and operational expenditures.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.j-lpgas.gr.jp/en/appliances/" rel="nofollow">https://www.j-lpgas.gr.jp/en/appliances/</a><p>(Interesting aside: some people in Japan combine these with a solar/battery array to achieve robust all-season off grid self sufficiency, without combustion, which I think is quite neat!)
Doing some back of the napkin math, their contractual minimum of 2.5 kWh a day into your water heater works out to 75 kWh a month. This [1] site claims the average two person home uses 195 kWh a month, so it potentially could be a decent offset. I do wonder whether this quoted 2.5 kWh is energy coming off the server into your heater, or if it's measured somewhere else. Energy loss from thermal transfer would make a huge difference in measured input into your heating system.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.keysenergy.com/typical-electric-usage-of-various-appliances/" rel="nofollow">https://www.keysenergy.com/typical-electric-usage-of-various...</a>
very clever but I wonder what kind of workloads are being run on these remote/edge compute nodes. there isn't any homogeneity in the network - everyone is going to be on a different kind of network with a huge variations in bandwidth and latency.<p>can't find any specs on what kind of compute power each physical installation would provide
This along with the increase in heat pumps, really makes me question air source heat pumps not directly hybridizing with water heaters (new water heaters have heat pumps that will cool your utility closet).<p>But using house heat pumps to cool air / heat water in the summer could at least decrease energy use during the day; and then in the winter, the water (as a heat source) can help assist older heat pumps in pumping heat from the cold (though modern heat pumps solve this problem)
in eastern europe they pump hot water directly to homes . it’s waste water from nearby power stations . you could do the same from the data center to homes
In Germany the startup that became Cloud&Heat Technologies started with the idea to sell a heating system for home powered by some computers. It seems that they have pivoted to sell 19" rack with water cooling that can be connected to a building heating system, more for companies than individual household.<p><a href="https://www.cloudandheat.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudandheat.com/</a><p>Here is an article from 2020 in German presenting the computer rack as a heating system.
<a href="http://www.energiesparhaushalt.de/1/intelligent-heizen-durch-server-abwaerme.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.energiesparhaushalt.de/1/intelligent-heizen-durch...</a><p>It looks like they didn't got much interest in the market and pivoted more to industrial customers. The main purpose now is not a computer node as a heating, but instead recovering the waste heat from computer rack for the heating system.
I wonder if you could do this yourself with a heat exchange (like from McMaster-Carr).<p>I've read before that if you run the loops "backwards", such that the two loops of the heat exchanger are flowing in opposite directions, that you can increase the rate of heat transfer by maximizing the difference in temperature.<p>Has anybody done this before?
Quite surprised that they’re running that off 4G<p>I’ve found tech driven heating to work quite well though. For small apartments you really don’t need all that much output if it’s 24/7
Prior art: <a href="https://qarnot.com/en" rel="nofollow">https://qarnot.com/en</a><p><a href="https://www.leaf.cloud/" rel="nofollow">https://www.leaf.cloud/</a><p><a href="https://www.cloudandheat.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudandheat.com/</a><p>I wonder how <i>that</i> worked out, given the development of energy prices...
Natural Gas companies near me began offering fiber services before Google Fiber did; because they had the infrastructure to monitor the lines and distribution nodes;<p>Given that fiber setup, the gas company has a low latency network.