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“Data Furnace” Would Heat Homes While Flipping Bits
- sbierwagen 15y agoIt's conceptually identical to electrical heating: an electrical heater is 100% "efficient", in that for every thousand watts of electricity it consumes, it produces a thousand watts of heat. A "data furnace" would be cheaper per watt of heat produced, if you could find someone to pay you to perform computationally expensive tasks; with the downside of significant upfront cost, and ongoing maintenance. (Replacing fans, harddrives, etc; while an electric baseboard heater is more or less maintenance free.) Except it's supposed to be a replacement for central forced-air furnaces, not baseboard heaters; which means it's directly competing with MicroCHP[1] in both up-front price and form-factor; a comparison it's going to lose, price/heat-watt wise. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_combined_heat_and_power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_combined_heat_and_power
- Udo 15y agoExactly. I've always wondered why large data centers are not used to heat the office space they are housed in. Last winter, I visited a data center in Norway and was kind of stunned when they answered my question about the excess heat with "oh, we just blow it again out through the aircon duct". By re-using the heat energy of a server farm, you're essentially using the same amount of electricity twice - this should be a real no-brainer (especially considering all those companies who are currently in the process of making their office towers "green").
- bbgm 15y agoI don't know if they still do it, but back in the day, I believe that's exactly what they did at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, or at least that's what we were told when I got a chance to see Mario, Jaromir, etc (supercomputers not hockey players) in the late 90's