The Computers That Heat Homes

There are places that are actually using computer and server waste heat to warm up homes in the winter!

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[DPedroBoh]

Although the water doesnt come out very hot, you have to take into consideration that it's still hotter than the natural water temperature, thus need an equivalent lesser amount of energy to heat to propper temperatures. So any amount of heat introduced from data centers can suffice to reduce an equivalent amount of waste energy. In theory, the amount you put from data centers is the amount you will save from water heaters.

[ArniesTech]

In fact our server room, even though full of super efficient computers, is noticeably warmer than the rest of the house. In winter we leave the Server room door open on purpose 😁🔥

[tramcrazy]

Here in the UK, a bit like Linus’ swimming pool water heating thingy, a few swimming pools have had small data centres installed in their cupboards to heat the pool. It means the pool doesn’t have to pay for the energy as the data centre company does that in exchange for somewhere to put the servers. Seems really cool!

[ecospider]

Our data center was about 4000 servers. It didn’t send heat to the city but it did send it to the rest of the building. I don’t think we had another heat source during the winter.

[herman]

People with 4090s might find this useful

[ronjakoistinen]

I used to work at the University of Helsinki, where some of the datacenters are located on the same campus with biology and agricultural studies. In the winter, waste heat from the datacenters is channeled to the campus greenhouses.

[JohnnieHougaardNielsen]

I remember an early waste heat recovery project from Denmark already 40 year ago, before data centers got so big as to being suitable contributors. Excess heat from a power plant, refinery and chemical industry was used to heat homes in 3 municipalities.

[Bob-nchz]

1:00 hot-water heating (using radiators) is pretty common throughout europe (it's pretty much the standard really), it's far from just a scandinavian thing.

It's been one of the issues retrofitting heat pumps into european houses, as it took some time for air-water pumps to really get into groove, and retrofitting a house into a US-style HVAC system is a lot more work (and expense), though it definitely has advantages.

[King_DarkSide]

My AMD 9590 warmed my entire house from one corner of it.

Now, that corner of the house was essentially unliveable unless you were gaming in the birth day suit 😂

[yensteel]

A while ago, there was an idea of low cost heating by installing a server into someone's home. The server does it's own thing quietly. I forgot who pays for what, but it's mutually beneficial.

[Bukki]

the old family computer at my house (a 2015 5k imac) actually heated the room when in use for anything more than basic web browsing… by a significant margin

tbh it was in the tiniest non-bath room i’ve ever been in

[xyzain_]

You guys should do a techquickie on RAM speed, and the difference between clock speed and data rate. I see some manufacturers using clock speed to define their RAM by doubling the clock speed instead of the data rate, which depends on rising and falling edges

[aspatzle]

The additional grid you mentioned already exits in a lot of cities here in Germany (it's called Fernwärme). In my city for example it is powered with a mixture of generators using wood, gas, oil etc. This is actually very practical for gradually moving towards renewables.
There is also a similar system for distributing cooling water (called Fernkälte). It's not meant for private houses it's for companies or research facilities that need the cooling (like battery research for example).

[BoyRoy]

In the netherlands we have "stadsverwarming" (cityheating) for al lot of homes. They use rest heat from the cooling water that comes from powerplants. So a swith over for datecenter heat should be very easy in this areas

[alexanderrogge]

I use PCs as space heaters. Intel CPUs have been the best for this, but now we also have graphics cards that run just as hot. One PC can heat a room in the winter, but the effect is negative in the summer because you need more cooling to remove the heat. What would be nice is to have something that could turn PC heat into electricity to cool the PC in the summer.

[GrnMamba]

Another good example of re-using the excess heat was in the UK, Exmouth Leisure Centre, where a council data centre is capturing heat with oil and then using a heat exchanger which can heat the pool to 30C, 60% of the time. This is somewhere where we have lost 65 leisure centres in the UK since 2019, partly due to running costs.

[BeechHorn]

I used Alex’s growbag solution which is great for summer, but in winter we use the air outlet to dry clothes (which also works like a humidifier).

[itskdog]

In the UK, there was something on the news a few months ago about a swimming pool that has a server rack that they rent the usage of, the heat from is then used to heat up the pool.

[tadeuszmarin]

I remembered back on my 24 meter square studio in southern Spain, since we didn't install any kind of heating whatsoever, it would get moderately cold on winter nights.

The solution: Turning on the 42 inch plasma TV. After 30 minutes, the flat would be noticeably warmer. Shame it was unusable in summer for the same reason.
It would have been hilarious to use that plasma to play games from a modern furnace gaming PC. Shame it would only do 1080i/720p, but the contrast and colors were amazing on that display.

[Galiant]

My small bedroom with my PC and two TVs and a few consoles definitely gets warm. In winter it's nice to be able to open my window up to cool down. But living with room mates it was agreed that when we use AC we only cool the place down to 76F. And my room often gets 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the house.