It's conceptually identical to electrical heating: an electrical heater is 100% "efficient", in that for every thousand watts of electricity it consumes, it pro

It'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