5 ms·
Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool
https://www.techspot.com/news/97995-data-center-uses-waste-heat-warm-public-pool.html https://www.techspot.com/news/97995-data-center-uses-waste-h...
- 9dev 3mo agoSomething I have been wondering: Why don't data centres use the excess heat for a sort of energy recuperation, turning at least some of it back into electricity?
- breitling 3mo agoI saw on TV a long time ago that a funeral home's "energy" (burning bodies) was used to heat homes somewhere in Europe. We can just use data centers for heating too...maybe turn around all these protests against them
- josefritzishere 3mo agoIf wishes were fishes.
- 9dev 3mo agoThere's lots of district heating in Germany for example, but it's usually fed from either big heat pumps, bio mass plants, or heat from waste incineration plants. There's no reason to not use excess heat from data centres too - I'm pretty sure I read that already being done in several places. But in some cases, a data centre might be too remotely located, or the infrastructure is too lacking to make it economically feasible, which still leaves me wondering why you couldn't try to recuperate at least some of it as electricity on-site...
- Symbiote 3mo ago> I'm pretty sure I read that already being done in several places. Presumably you read this very recently, since it's mentioned at the end of the article.
- SilasX 3mo agoSid Meier's Alpha Centauri: "It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people."
- wffurr 3mo agoIt's not anywhere near hot enough to generate steam and make electricity. There are uses for low grade heat but they require colocation and careful design, which costs more than just dumping the heat.
- cyberax 3mo agoIt actually is, just not water steam. There's a hot springs resort in Alaska that uses pentane (boiling point 38C) to generate energy. The efficiency is terrible, of course.
- fghorow 3mo agoTrue. Chena Hot Springs [1]. They are famous in the "direct use" geothermal community. A lot of the thermal energy is not used for electrical generation. Although a small portion actually is -- made possible by the \Delta T rejecting heat at a low annual average atmospheric T. Most of the rest of the heat is used to run an absorption chiller to maintain the ice "palace" in the summer. (This info might be slightly outdated. It was true about 2018 or thereabouts when I met the owner of the resort at a geothermal conference.) [1] <https://www.chenahotsprings.com/ https://www.chenahotsprings.com/>.
- newpavlov 3mo agoBecause it's not economical, the required hardware is unlikely to pay for itself during its lifetime. The gradient is too small (~50C), which means low Carnot efficiency. Additionally, extraction of low-enthalpy energy involves obstruction of heat transfer, meaning lower cooling efficiency. It may have been a different story if we had computer hardware able to efficiently operate at 200-300C. Even steel plants which deal with significantly higher waste heat gradients rarely bother with recovering energy.
- soco 3mo ago> It may have been a different story if we had computer hardware able to efficiently operate at 200-300C. Do I see a market opening here?
- IshKebab 3mo agoThe degree to which you can extract energy from heat depends on the temperature difference compared to ambient. Efficient power stations all need super heated steam (like 600C). This would be like 100C max which is not very useful for generating electricity. It's fine for heating houses and swimming pools though.
- muvlon 3mo agoThe concept of waste-heat-to-power (WHP) exists, but its efficiency is limited by thermodynamics. Basically, heat energy is not equal to usable energy. All energy ultimately wants to be heat energy, and it is much easier and more efficient to go from electrical or mechanical energy to heat than vice-versa. Therefore, when you do have an application that actually wants heat, not electricity, such as a public swimming pool or district heating, it is way more efficient to use your waste heat as heat. Even in cases where the desired temperature is wildly different from that of your waste heat, you can convert one heat level into another very efficiently using heat pumps.
- alnwlsn 3mo agoLook up Carnot efficiency. The maximum amount of work you can theoretically extract depends only on a temperature difference. For a datacenter running chips at 100C into ambient air at 60F, it's about 25%. So even with perfect capture, you are guaranteed to lose 3/4 of your input energy to the datacenter as heat anyway. For comparison, an IC engine has a Carnot efficiency of something like 80% on paper, but the reality you get is only 20-30%
- snarf21 3mo agoUndecided just did an episode on a waste heat machine that is being slowly rolled out to industry. The founder of the company is also the guy who invented the Super Soaker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuQRxatte5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuQRxatte5g
- pocksuppet 3mo agoCarnot's law of thermodynamics says you can only do this effectively if you can run the computers at a few hundred, or ideally thousand, degrees C. Landauer's principle says that even if we could build computers to work at those temperatures, they'd need more power anyway.
- DerArzt 3mo agoI recently watched a short video by Matt Ferrell going over the R&D for an electric generator that does just that [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/MuQRxatte5g?is=GUyY4kPH-7WklV1E https://youtu.be/MuQRxatte5g?is=GUyY4kPH-7WklV1E
- fjni 3mo agoBathhouse in New York wrote about this. Not sure they still do it to this day. https://help.abathhouse.com/hc/en-us/articles/16748674443924-Do-you-mine-Bitcoin-How-does-it-work https://help.abathhouse.com/hc/en-us/articles/16748674443924...
- stavros 3mo agoI don't understand how a server (the "washing-machine-sized datacenter") can heat up any fraction of a swimming pool appreciably. Wouldn't it be a few kW tops?
- driverdan 3mo agoGPU power density is very high. The B300, for example, is rated at 1400W TDP. You can fit a lot of B300s in the space of a washing machine.
- gravel7623 3mo agoAnd more importantly, once the pool is warm enough (or in a very hot day), doesn't it lose its cooling efficiency?
- swiftcoder 3mo agoA 30C swimming pool vs a 70C GPU is plenty of temperature difference for a heat exchanger to work with. And even indoor swimming pools have horrific levels of heat loss due to evaporation. But I think the key thing here is that they've undersized the server rack - if its only offsetting 60% of the heating bill, there's a fair margin still being handled by a regular heat pump, which can cycle down in warmer weather.
- chippiewill 3mo agoPre-GPU times you'd be right, but these days a 4U server could have 8 GPUs pulling 350+ watts each. A washing machine sized unit could contain perhaps 4 of these 4U servers so the unit as a whole could be drawing upwards of 11kW.
- chucksta 3mo agoNo expert but I would think an indoor pool in a temperature controlled environment would control for a lot of heat loss from the water.
- sushibowl 3mo agoThis washing machine sized box draws 50kW of power. It wouldn't be able to heat up a cold swimming pool very much, but it would be enough to keep a pool that's already hot at a stable temperature.
- cm2012 3mo agoAll data centers that are in controversial areas should offer free heated swimming pools for the neighborhood. You could add a giant pool complex as a percentage or two of the cost of a big data center.
- bojangleslover 3mo agoThis is an unironically good idea
- gruez 3mo agoSurely it's just cheaper to build further away from residential areas? For this to work you'd need to be close to residential areas, but that's where you get the most NIMBY opposition. And if the datacenter is in the middle of some industrial park, who would want to drive 30 minutes to an industrial park to have a swim?
- vidarh 3mo agoThe last place I lived, the nearest data centre was a few hundred meters from the local swimming pool, in a business park. Most people would never have known the data centre was there. Elsewhere, e.g. in London, Docklands is both full of high density data centres and high-end residential buildings and offices that could certain use the waste heat in winter at least. Most of the data centres there just looks like office buildings on the outside, and most residents won't know they are there.
- lvspiff 3mo ago
- theodric 3mo agoEquinix AM3 provides heat to the Amsterdam Science Park. Undisclosed large Swiss private corporate datacenter provides heat to residential complexes in the surrounding area, as well as being integrated with the grid operator and required to spin up generators and island itself on demand, as part of the license to operate. Many such cases!
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- matheusmoreira 3mo agoIs it feasible to do this at smaller scales? Would be cool to use my compurers to heat water at home. Put all that useless heat to good use. Air conditioners could do it too, right? Pump heat into a water reservoir instead of just throwing it away?
- newpavlov 3mo agoSome people use cryptocurrency miners to heat their homes. It's certainly better than dumb resistive heating, but depending on various conditions it can cost more than installing a heat pump.
- matheusmoreira 3mo agoA dedicated heat pump would be cheaper if we consider heating to be the device's primary purpose. The idea is the computers are doing all sorts of useful things, and the heat is just a free byproduct of that activity.
- RulerOf 3mo agoI have a pool heater and an air conditioner, and I'm running both at the same time. They're fifty feet apart, but this thought crosses my mind constantly.
- alexpotato 3mo agoThis does exist btw. It's a stainless steel coil that you can put on your A/C and then run water from your pool over it to heat the pool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7fB8ul9dZw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7fB8ul9dZw
- ryukoposting 3mo agoThe sticker on the side of the doohickey in the video really gives the whole thing a feeling of "a dude makes these by hand in his garage." I looked up "AC pool heat exchanger" and lo and behold, the same company showed up as the first result: https://www.hotspotenergy.com/titanium-pool-heat-exchangers/ https://www.hotspotenergy.com/titanium-pool-heat-exchangers/
- teeray 3mo ago> Start-up Deep Green charges clients to use its computing power for artificial intelligence and machine learning. What about running the compute workloads of the municipality instead?
- avianlyric 3mo agoI doubt the municipality needs 28kW of GPU compute, and certainly not at the prices someone like Deep Green is going to be charging.
- sschueller 3mo agoProviding remote heat is a common thing in Switzerland[1]. Just like Waste valorisation plants[2] that additionally produce electricity. [1] https://www.computerwoche.de/article/2690747/rechenzentrum-heizt-oeffentliches-hallenbad.html https://www.computerwoche.de/article/2690747/rechenzentrum-h... [2] https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/ https://stefan.schueller.net/posts/kva-winterthur/
- dn3500 3mo agoWhat a useless article! I found some actual information here: https://www.techspot.com/news/97995-data-center-uses-waste-heat-warm-public-pool.html https://www.techspot.com/news/97995-data-center-uses-waste-h... The "data center" produces about 28 kW of heat and the swimming pool has cut its gas bill by 62%. They are saving US$24,000 per year.
- alexpotato 3mo agoI don't know about in swimming centers in England but I do know YMCAs in the US often have budgets that look like: - Revenue: $25.01M - Expenses: $25M So "small savings" like this can add up for them.
- appplication 3mo agoThis is mostly just due to how nonprofits work. If you have excess revenue, you can’t return it to shareholders so you might as well spend it on mission-oriented activities.
- pocksuppet 3mo agoYou can, and should, keep it in case you have less revenue next year though.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoYou can do this up to a point but if it looks like you're actually making a profit it might raise questions eventually. Keeping enough to cover one year's operating costs is pretty common though.
- throwaway27448 3mo agoGod forbid a non-profit try and compete honestly
- 3mo ago
- hahn-kev 3mo ago> The heat generated by a washing-machine-sized data centre is being used to heat a Devon public swimming pool. You mean server.
- hkt 3mo agoEyeballing my washing machine leads me to believe they have a quarter rack or so.
- Schlagbohrer 3mo ago> "Sean Day, who runs the leisure centre, said he had been expecting its energy bills to rise by £100,000 this year. "The partnership has really helped us reduce the costs of what has been astronomical over the last 12 months - our energy prices and gas prices have gone through the roof," he said. ... Last summer, BBC News revealed 65 swimming pools had closed since 2019, with rising energy costs cited as a significant reason." That's terrible that pools are closing. No one even builds new public swimming pools anymore, so it's awful to close the few that exist.
- designerarvid 3mo agoIn my home town the local steel plant has been connected to the district heating systems for half a century. This is extremely mature technology and widely used in parts of the world where heating homes is more important than cooling them.
- sjs382 3mo agoLinusTechTips did this at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-4JJbk3ZS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-4JJbk3ZS0
- khurs 3mo agoThe date of the article is 2023.
- ano-ther 3mo agoHere is a Swiss one that heats 6,000 apartments. https://d4project.org/ https://d4project.org/ > The data center delivers up to 1.7 MW of reusable heat – enough enough to warm 6,000 energy-efficient homes in winter or provide 20,000 five-minute showers every day in summer. https://blog.siemens.com/2026/05/sustainable-data-infomaniaks-d4-data-center-heats-eco-neighborhood-from-renewable-energy/ https://blog.siemens.com/2026/05/sustainable-data-infomaniak... https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-inaugurates-a-revolutionary-data-center-that-recovers-100-of-its-energy-for-building-heating/ https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-inaugurates-a-revo...
- hnburnsy 3mo agoFrance did one better... Paris 2024: Excess Data Center Heat Used to Warm Olympic Swimming Pools https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/paris-2024-excess-data-center-heat-used-to-warm-olympic-swimming-pools https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/paris-202...
- fghorow 3mo agoDistrict heating is a mature technology. Direct Use geothermal heat is the one I am personally most familiar with -- as a geophysicist. However "waste" heat utilization is a definite thing for people with mechanical engineering/heat and mass transfer training. (Edited to add: there are several examples of public swimming pools being heated with Low T geothermal heat in the Perth metropolitan region of Western Australia.)
- butlike 3mo agoSo this proves that data centers are bad for the environment? Scale this up, and it's clear our oceans are screwed.