My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.

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catigula 3 hours ago | parent [-]

People were doing this as a donation, not because they perceived it to be free.

	▲	Brian_K_White a few seconds ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I am here to inform you that people were doing this for a variety of reasons, and one of those absolutely was because the cycles were free and going to waste.
	▲	rtkwe 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		True but it was much cheaper when a computer you might have on for other reasons wouldn't consume noticeably more power for your donation, eg computer lab admins which I think made up some of the top contenders of the leader boards. There were definitely groups that would run clusters of computers just for the donation (my dad was one of those too, there was no other reason to run those PCs other than Seti@Home) but for the average home user it was spare cycles that were low cost to free.