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Confused, could you explain? A heater that puts its energy into something other than heating is just being inefficient at heating, right? Shouldn't you want it
by mehrdadn 7y ago
Confused, could you explain? A heater that puts its energy into something other than heating is just being inefficient at heating, right? Shouldn't you want it to put 100% of its energy into heating?
- greiskul 7y agoWell, not really, let's say we want to heat a room to 25 degrees Celsius. If we are converting 100% of the electricity used to heat, it will take X energy. If we use the energy for computing instead, and use the waste heat to heat the room, it will take maybe a little more energy. But the thing is, the computing is valuable, and with the money we can gain by "renting" the computing, we can buy more electricity, so we come out on top. Now, like someone else commented, if you really want to heat an environment, the traditional resistance heating is not the best solution. With a heat pump, you can cheat, and get an efficiency of over 100% (because instead of using the energy to heat the room, you are using the energy to take heat from somewhere else and also put it in the room).
- mehrdadn 7y agoAre you trying to be energy-efficient or are you trying to be cost-efficient? I thought the former but it seems you mean the latter.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Sharlin 7y agoTo very good approximation, 100% of the energy used by a contemporary computer is turned to heat. The amount of negentropy generated by the computations is utterly dwarfed by the increase in entropy in the computer's surroundings. Computers are space heaters that happen to do some calculations as a side effect.
- rightbyte 7y agoI wonder if WD and friends do generative braking on the hard drives.
- mehrdadn 7y agoI do realize that and I still don't get how doing computation is supposed to increase the energy efficiency of heating. Are you trying to reduce wasted energy while heating by diverting it to computation, or are you trying to avoid wasted energy in computing by utilizing the otherwise-wasted heat? It seems like you're optimizing the cost efficiency of computation while claiming it improves the energy efficiency of heating...
- foota 7y agoComputing is heating, but with benefits, to a rough approximation. The components inside the computer do something with the electricity, which results in it being turned into heat. So by doing useful computing and using the created heat as a result for heating something, you've effectively made the heating free, to the degree you can use the computing for something useful.
- mehrdadn 7y agoOK, I think I see why we're seeing this differently. The only way this actually saves energy (instead of merely money) is if, later in the future, you would've actually wasted the heat that would've be produced if your initial goal had been computation. In that case, yes, it's true that doing the computation now and using it for heat is better. My assumption was that you would be already using any heat you generate from computation for heating regardless, so it didn't make sense to me that, in other situations where your goal is only heating, adding computation to the problem would save any energy. (Sorry this is complicated to explain, I hope it makes sense. Regardless, I get your point.)