4 ms·
What happens in summer?
by dmritard96 11y ago
What happens in summer?
- glibgil 11y agoIt still heats of course. It's free heat.
- Carrok 11y agoif you "turn off" the eRadiator, the servers don't actually turn off; the heat is just pushed outside Same as in a data center, the heat gets pushed outside.
- jessaustin 11y agoTFA: To be eligible for the eRadiator, your home has to have... "an external wall" ... and the external wall is needed for venting (if you "turn off" the eRadiator, the servers don't actually turn off; the heat is just pushed outside). Admittedly, without active refrigeration this is unlikely to work too well when the temperature outside is over 35 C. EDIT: they don't mention separate electric supplies, so presumably the unit has a way of tracking its power usage and reimbursing the homeowner. Otherwise this is just a scam, because far more efficient electrical [EDIT: thanks 'votingprawn!] heat pumps are available for less initial cost. However, the non-scam scenario seems only to make sense as a business in cold locations.
- nine_k 11y agoMakes complete sense in Scandinavia, Iceland, Alaska, etc.
- jessaustin 11y agoIs this a correction? A clarification? Was it insensitive to describe those places as "cold"?
- nine_k 11y agoA clarification. For instance, there's plenty of cold in Antarctica, but no fiber and not enought dwellings. In Scandinavia, high fixed broadband penetration is actually combined with cold most of the year. (JFYI, Finnish official definition of summer is temperatures above +10°C for entire 24 hours.)
- votingprawn 11y ago> because far more efficient electrical heaters How are you defining efficiency here? Efficiency is usually defined as (useful power out)/(power in), and basically all the power that goes into a computer comes out again as heat, which in this case is considered useful. Not really convinced you could buy a heater that was measurably more efficient. ETA: heat pump would do it, didn't spring to mind when I read heater though!
- tinkerdol 11y ago> seems only to make sense as a business in cold locations. I'd change that to read "in cold or temperate locations." There are plenty of locations in Europe for example that rarely have days over 30 C yet don't often get below freezing in the winter. Doesn't make sense to describe these places as particularly "cold."
- jloughry 11y agoCloud computing users don't care---modulo network latency and, to some extent, national laws regarding data privacy and seizure of servers---where their servers are physically located. When it's summer in the northern hemisphere, it's winter in the southern; I'm sure they're looking at South America too.
- wmf 11y agoSure, but I don't think the provider can afford to buy servers and only run them for half the year.
- dzhiurgis 11y agoInternational speeds on a consumer grade line are usually crap, around 10% of declared speed. This could be a supplement for existing systems, perhaps even a backup or to serve some use spikes. But definitely not a replacement.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoThis is best suited for async workloads (think EC2 spot instances or cpu intensive distributed computing tasks) where network performance isn't critical.
- blacksmith_tb 11y agoWe just need to roll our own clusters of RPi-s driven off Peltier junctions arctic-silvered to the side, and we can run our own parasitic cloud provider off the waste heat. It's turtles all the way down...
- dzhiurgis 11y agoI assume next versions will have AC? There are only few days a year when it gets over 30 in Scandinavia & Baltics.
- arethuza 11y agoProbably more like a few days a decade when it even approaches that here in Scotland!