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| ▲ | jdietrich 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| There are a number of pilot projects currently in development to heat entire neighbourhoods using the waste heat from data centers. Unless you've got a monster ML workstation under your desk or a crypto mining rig in your garage, that surplus heat isn't especially useful and isn't really worth harvesting. A typical desktop PC only dissipates a few tens of watts at idle or a few hundred watts under heavy gaming loads, versus many kilowatts for a typical domestic water heater. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-homes-to-be-... |
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| ▲ | dgacmu 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have used a mini home-datacenter to heat my house in winter (very effectively - I used a fan to direct the heat towards the intake for the AC system and ran the AC fan). But I decided against the HW heater version of it from a cost recovery perspective - we just don't use that much hot water and we had a then-new high efficiency gas hot water heater. However, there's a fairly straightforward way to get halfway there: You can run a standard heat pump hot water heater and put the computers in the same room with it. The computers will heat the air, the heat pump hot water heater will cool the air. Won't be as efficient as a closed loop system directly connecting the computers to the HW heater but you also won't need to worry about whether the heat production and consumption are balanced. |
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| ▲ | mikepurvis 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I’ve long been annoyed in the summer every time I turn on a heat generating appliance (stove, dryer, on-demand hot water) and then think about all the waste heat my air conditioner dumped out the side of the house in the last X hours. It would be amazing to somehow store that heat in a reservoir where it could be later used. I doubt the extra piping and infrastructure is anywhere near worth it, but I sometimes fantasize about an experimental building that was designed from the get-go with a single integrated heat loop that all the major appliances were plugged into, and how that might look. Seems like the sort of thing that could be tried in a much more confined space such as for an off-grid RV. |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > I doubt the extra piping and infrastructure is anywhere near worth it I wonder. Infrastructure investments tend to have absurd payoffs. For example, my solar energy equipment has been generating profit for years. In my country 5 kW electric showers are common every day items and they add up to a huge chunk of household energy consumption. Switching to a more efficient water heating system has been on my mind for years. If I can use my home server as a heating element, so much the better. Could even use free CPU cycles to mine Monero on it. A solar powered cryptocurrency mining home serving water heating computer. Wow. I also think a lot about the heat my air conditioners constantly pump out of my house. Seems like a waste to just throw it out of the house like that. Ideally it would be stored so that it could be used to heat other things later... To me it seems like it should be possible with enough integration. | | |
| ▲ | mikepurvis 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it boils down to a) effectively storing heat for later use is extremely difficult to do well, and b) moving heat around properly means 400psi compressor tubes everywhere, and those are a lot more fragile and annoying to work with than regular plumbing, and you need a special gas licence to charge them up afterward. In contrast to the RV proposal, maybe a better option could be something like a boutique hotel, where you’ve got 100+ showers happening every morning, so having a giant cistern of hot water that you dump all the waste heat from AC, fridges, and freezers into makes a ton of sense. | | | |
| ▲ | Groxx 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are heat-pump water heaters, if that fills in a conceptual gap. The main complaint I've seen with them has just been that they're slow, but that's more of a product-design (at a price point) issue than anything fundamental afaict. |
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| ▲ | markovs_gun 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The main problems I see are that we don't clean the insides of computer parts and we can drink water with way more calcium in it than is good for high temperature water heaters. Cooling water needs to be treated to not grow algae and bacteria in it, and a lot of times that renders it poisonous to drink. Conversely, drinking water has a lot of minerals still in it and those minerals will deposit and form scale on the insides of your heat transfer surfaces, which will severely impact performance over time. It may not even take that long depending on how hot the surface is and how hard your water is. |
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| ▲ | swiftcoder 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There should not be any contact between your heat source and your drinking water, in pretty much any modern water-heating system. You heat a refrigerant, then run it and the water through opposite sides of a heat exchanger (most domestic hot water tanks have a coil-style heat exchanger inside). | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I assume whatever fluids are used for heat transfer would circulate in completely separate circuits from the water used or consumed by humans. | | |
| ▲ | 0xCMP 4 days ago | parent [-] | | That is how it works. There is the water which goes outside pumped through pipes on the floor of the pool like in-floor heating. That is pumped so it cools down the water going through the computers. It has gone through several revisions plus complications with wanting to heat up solar panels too. |
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| ▲ | FinnKuhn 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Two issues I see here would be that a) the demand and production of how water and compute power might not align and b) the amount of water heated this way would probably not be nearly enough for most people. What is probably more feasible is to save on heating costs by heating your apartment partially with your computer. |
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| ▲ | appease7727 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Heat pump water heaters are a product you can (probably) buy today. They suck ambient heat from the air and stuff it into the water. I really want to get one and pipe all the exhaust from my homelab to it. |
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| ▲ | swiftcoder 3 days ago | parent [-] | | They are pretty common in Europe, because older houses here all had gas-powered furnaces, and with an air-to-water heat pump you can continue to use the existing tubing and radiators. New house builds often include one to run domestic hot water and under-floor heating for bedrooms and such. The downside here is that you probably also need an air-to-air heat pump for cooling in summer, and now you have two expensive heat pumps, and a whole extra set of pipes running around... |
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| ▲ | withinboredom 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Linus (tech talks) uses it to heat his pool. |
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| ▲ | clickety_clack 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This would be a really cool idea for municipal swimming pools or large residential developments. It blows my mind that people pay to heat up all these data centers and then pay again to get rid of the heat. Data centers could rent space by paying in kWh of heat. I would set something like this up in my house if there was some kind of decentralized processing company I could register with. | |
| ▲ | thangngoc89 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I remember in a video, Linus measured that the ground absorbs all the heat before it could even reaching the pool. | | |
| ▲ | withinboredom 4 days ago | parent [-] | | His pipes have too much or not enough insulation then. | | |
| ▲ | lubsch 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't know anything about the topic and this made me really curious. Why could too much insulation be a problem? | | |
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