4 ms·

This seems like an interesting, but inefficient solution. (What do you do during the summer when heat isn't needed? How much more do these units cost over a reg

by netfire 11y ago

This seems like an interesting, but inefficient solution. (What do you do during the summer when heat isn't needed? How much more do these units cost over a regular computer at a data center? Who is paying for the electricity and bandwidth for these machines?) Is there some sort of complementary process that could use the heat generated by the data center at the site itself? (energy production, manufacturing, etc)

kozak 11y ago
During summer it will dump heat outside through the wall. That's why the device requires to be installed on an external wall. That's actually quite smart, if they can implement the actual mechanism inexpensively and reliably.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
Yeah that's much more interesting. There's a limited need to do these things locally. Not just data centres btw, factories, too, actually mainly. But that requires heat pipes throughout cities, basically next to your electricity, internet, water & sewage, you now want additional heat pipes running through every home. That requires huge infrastructure investments, which makes sense for new real estate, but is probably not worth it for existing homes. Lower hanging fruit is actually other factories. The infrastructure to connect these two is much more trivial in scale, as well as in execution (laying a pipe in sandy industrial land isn't as big a deal as under paved residential areas). For non-factory buildings like swimming pools, this works great, too. So in the Netherlands for example there's one milk factory which heats and cleanses swimming pool water. (the pool was built with this in mind though, not retrofitted). And one large elderly home is heated by waste heat from a sewage cleaning facility. Another entire industrial area of factories is supplied with the heat from a waste burning facility. All of this is much easier than tackling homes, for now.

by netfire 11y ago

kozak 11y ago

During summer it will dump heat outside through the wall. That's why the device requires to be installed on an external wall. That's actually quite smart, if they can implement the actual mechanism inexpensively and reliably.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

Yeah that's much more interesting. There's a limited need to do these things locally. Not just data centres btw, factories, too, actually mainly. But that requires heat pipes throughout cities, basically next to your electricity, internet, water & sewage, you now want additional heat pipes running through every home. That requires huge infrastructure investments, which makes sense for new real estate, but is probably not worth it for existing homes. Lower hanging fruit is actually other factories. The infrastructure to connect these two is much more trivial in scale, as well as in execution (laying a pipe in sandy industrial land isn't as big a deal as under paved residential areas). For non-factory buildings like swimming pools, this works great, too. So in the Netherlands for example there's one milk factory which heats and cleanses swimming pool water. (the pool was built with this in mind though, not retrofitted). And one large elderly home is heated by waste heat from a sewage cleaning facility. Another entire industrial area of factories is supplied with the heat from a waste burning facility. All of this is much easier than tackling homes, for now.