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Amazon’s Seattle campus is using a data center next door as a furnace
- candiodari 9y agoUsing things that need cooling, datacenters, factories, mines, ... has a very long history.
- lclarkmichalek 9y agoFB is doing something similar in Denmark, heating 6900 homes: http://www.decentralized-energy.com/articles/2017/09/facebook-data-center-to-heat-danish-city.html http://www.decentralized-energy.com/articles/2017/09/faceboo...
- hdkrgr 9y agoTechnical University Munich has been doing this since at least 2011 to heat half of their campus: https://www.lrz.de/services/compute/supermuc/systemdescription/ https://www.lrz.de/services/compute/supermuc/systemdescripti... (see section on warm water cooling)
- whatusername 9y agoIBM/GIB-Services used a DC to heat a municipal swimming pool in 2008: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/04/02/data-center-used-to-heat-swimming-pool http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/04/02/data-...
- msl09 9y agoHaha, I remembered that people have proposed that solution many times and I was about to ask what changed before reading the comments.
- nicpottier 9y agoI have a winter cabin up in the mountains near Seattle, which so happens to have some of the cheapest electricity in the world. (there are quite a few cryptocurrency mines nearby) Though we generally heat the place using a modern, efficient wood stove, I've half seriously been pondering buying a few graphics cards and doing some Ethereum mining to heat the basement. If I wasn't a bit scared about it setting the place on fire I'd probably do it, but pretty sure I'd end up heating the place for free after a season.
- mv4 9y agoI am building one right now for my shed.
- lexicality 9y agoHave you ever considered a Rocket Mass Heater? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater) I've been fascinated by them since I found out about the concept but renting inside a city has never given me the chance to try one out.
- nicpottier 9y agoThese are definitely interesting, kind of have to build your house around one though. We currently use a wood stove that uses a catalytic combuster, so actually reburns the smoke for even more heat. Silly efficiency and almost no particulate matter so passes even the most stringent environmental laws. Its actually one the greenest ways to heat a place like ours. (it only heats the main living area though, we use small space heaters for bedrooms downstairs)
- lostlogin 9y agoA wetback powering distant radiators is what I want to do. It’s just that the radiators look ugly and aren’t easily removed in summer.
- lwhalen 9y agoAre there any data centers up that way, by chance?
- nicpottier 9y agoThere are a few, though perhaps things are changing up there: http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/High-Capacity-Data-Centers-Blindsided-by-Increase-in-Utilities-Charges.html http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/High-Capacity-Data-Center...
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- mschuster91 9y agoWonder if it's feasible to sell Bitcoin mining rigs doubling as a heat generator... for what its worth they could pay themselves.
- mattmanser 9y agoThey already do: http://en.hotmine.io/ http://en.hotmine.io/
- mv4 9y agoThis Russian startup designed a heater that mines Ether: https://thenextweb.com/tech/2017/10/13/russian-ethereum-heater-cryptominer/ https://thenextweb.com/tech/2017/10/13/russian-ethereum-heat...
- eat_veggies 9y agoNothing new under the sun, haha https://thenextweb.com/tech/2017/10/13/russian-ethereum-heater-cryptominer/ https://thenextweb.com/tech/2017/10/13/russian-ethereum-heat...
- psyc 9y agoI have a friend who is heating his home exclusively with mining rigs this winter. I'm not sure what he plans to do next summer.
- jameskegel 9y agoI'm doing this right now; in the summer I just run the AC and the rigs still outcompete my power bill by about 2x
- psyc 9y agoThat's great to know! I wasn't sure how the AC cost would work out.
- jameskegel 9y agoI live in Memphis, TN. We enjoy cheap power at a rate of .0909USD per kWh
- semi-extrinsic 9y agoWaste heat usage has been a thing since around the time we invented the steam engine. Regenerative heating was in fact key to the first industrial revolution, it was the only way to make blast furnaces with high enough temperature and power. It's only recently that datacenter power usage (and thus waste heat) has become large enough for waste heat usage to be interesting.
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoSince before the steam engine even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_bed-stove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_bed-stove
- hkmurakami 9y agoI'm pretty sure my college used the heat product from its cogeneration plant on campus to heat our buildings and dorms. Actually, that was probably already a thing when Bezos was a student there.
- IgorPartola 9y agoA lot of colleges use cogeneration plants. Almost nobody else does. From what I understand, it nearly doubles the total efficiency of burning coal, though the output is not more electricity but heat. The physics is pretty simple as explained by the Carnot cycle [1]: Efficiency <= 1 - Tc / Th, where Tc is the cold exhaust temperature and Th is the hot temperature. This is of course a theoretical ideal engine. The issue is that for something like a coal or oil or gas plant, Tc is still damn hot. Something like 900 degrees F is common. It's too low to use for a second cycle of electricity usage, but it's still plenty hot to heat your living room. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency#Carnot_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency#Carnot_effi...
- khuey 9y agoA good portion of Manhattan has a steam system that's partially fed by cogeneration.
- cprecioso 9y agoJust went a few days ago to the TU Delft incubator and they showed us the whole building gets hot water with a bunch of servers doing intense calculations. The startup that places these servers has really low prices for cloud computing because of this.
- moonbug22 9y agoCHP was invented about an hour after the steam engine. FFS.
- sparcpile 9y agoA dot-com back in the last 90s that a friend of mine ran with a Sun E10K proposed selling the hot air to a pizza restaurant that was next door. The restaurant ended up declining because air was too dirty and could not be for cooking.
- scosman 9y agoDev 1: it's kinda cold in the office, should we call ops? Dev 2: naaa, just spin up a cluster if c5.18xls
- sathackr 9y agoRelevant: Bitcoin Boiler http://en.hotmine.io http://en.hotmine.io
- bartkappenburg 9y agoSee Nerdalize[0] From their site: Heat your home with cloud servers! The CloudBox contains powerful servers, used by companies and researchers for their computations. The produced heat is used to heat up the water in your home. You get free hot water and save on your gas bill. And you contribute to an enormous reduction of CO2 emissions! I think that’s a really nice concept! [0] https://www.nerdalize.com/heating/ https://www.nerdalize.com/heating/
- pentae 9y agoImagine how great it would be if we lived in a society where our homes were easily hooked up with internet fast enough to run servers from home? Must be nice.
- jjeaff 9y agoHow fast would it need to be? Would a Google fiber style 1Gb up and down connection be plenty for a single rack of servers?
- mattnewton 9y agoBut then what about your own use?
- zitterbewegung 9y agoIf it was a workload like bitcoin it would not need a fast connection at all. You could ship it with a copy of the Blockchain and it would download the delta after you turn it on.
- forgot-my-pw 9y agoI think it will be pretty limited usage too considering if you want it to access database on the same local network. This will be more useful for computationally heavy usages with minimal data transfers.
- producernyc 9y agoDealing with waste has been an issue we've been dealing with since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
- spatten 9y agoTelus, the big phone company and ISP in British Columbia, does this in downtown Vancouver[1]. IIRC, I first heard about this in Work Like Nature[2][3] [1]: http://www.vancouversun.com/g00/technology/telus+million+development+will+waste+heat+from+nearby+data+centre/8028880/story.html?i10c.encReferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNhLw%3D%3D http://www.vancouversun.com/g00/technology/telus+million+dev... [2]: https://leanpub.com/worklikenature https://leanpub.com/worklikenature [3]: I have a double conflict of interest here. The author is my wife, and Leanpub is my startup.
- IgorPartola 9y agoI actually would love to heat my basement area with a mining rig. Last time I mined stuff was before ASICs for BitCoin were a thing. Is it possible to GPU mine stuff nowadays in a way that's even remotely profitable, when you count the savings on heat? My current electric rate is just under $0.095.