THIS Is How The Cloud Will Heat Your Water For FREE!

What if every time you watched YouTube it helped heat your hot water....for free??! Data centres are the beating heart of our digital lives and consume a tremendous amount of electricity. Unfortunately, they also waste a lot of electricity and so companies like Heata are pioneering ways to capture that waste heat for domestic hot water. Even better than that, they’ve found a way to bring the waste heat closer to your home via distributed servers and the cloud. Confused? Science fiction?! Imogen met the Heata team and visited an installation to make sense of this repurposed tech!

00:00 Intro
00:52 What are we talking about?!
02:03 What does Heata do?
02:43 How much heat can you really get?
03:44 The process in practice
05:08 Customer experience
06:00 When can we see this in our homes?
06:51 Data security and WiFi worries
07:59 What's next for Heata

We need to make a little correction! 3 minutes in, Mike tells us that the unit can deliver 200 W of power over a period of an hour, which is technically not 200W / hr but 200W. Thank you John for pointing this out and keeping us on our toes!

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#cleanenergy #decarbonisingheat #datacentres #digital #waste #electrify #server #innovation #technology #cloud

[ImogenBhogal]

If you've got to work to create energy, there's no point wasting it - i thought this was such a neat way to try and use that waste for something good! Would you opt for a server on your cylinder if it got you off gas??

[connclissmann]

In the interim, build data centres close to established public swimming pools. The pool is heated for free, and the data centre gets a free heatsink via a great exchanger, so reducing cooling costs.

[LaReynedEpee]

Some years ago I suggested to an employer that we reroute all the heat being sucked from our datacentre back into the building to warm it using heat recovery, was given all sorts of justifications for not doing it. Venting it into the atmosphere - what a waste!

[drunkenhobo]

One of the maddest things about my workplace is the server room has an air conditioning unit that runs constantly, even in winter whilst the radiators in every other room are on full blast.

Then again it was also built with zero insulation and radiators mounted to the roof. So not exactly the most well-planned building.

[WolfClinton]

What a very good idea! Maybe our future home computers could be water cooled servers next to the hot water cylinder ?

[tonybkent]

This is why my son's bedroom radiator is always turned off, even in winter. His room is so darn hot because his computer is on all the time! 😂

[randomjasmicisrandom]

Just over ten years ago I took a York school computer science class on a trip to the data centre of a company responsible for activating credit cards and offering credit score checks. Their server centre was mind boggling, their monthly electricity bill was in the tens of thousands of pounds, and as stated in this video a lot of that was spent on keeping the stacks of servers cool. I can’t imagine that sort of data being farmed out, even with security, but this is still an amazing idea. It just goes to show how much can be achieved with the right incentives.

[davidkohnstamm]

I worked at Nerdalize, and currently running Leafcloud doing more or less the same but in a different scale. I wish the team at Heata best of luck in this though market! If they want I will tell them some pitfalls to watch out for free of charge!

[matthewspencer]

Very clever, I like it

It's similar to what that YouTuber did Linus from Linus Tech tips he was building a computer server into his new family home and he's using it to heat his family swimming pool. That was a really cool project as well.

[Daddo]

This is a brilliant implementation for anyone whose only option for electric heating is resistive heater (no heat pump or district heating), because if you look at this from the other side this is an electric resistive heater that you attach to your hot water tank and it produces something useful for someone else in the process, who then pays for the electricity.

There is a massive potential for the advantages to the person who has this technology in their house to grow... For example, our homes are becoming "smarter", but the amount of compute needed in the controller is so minuscule, that even Raspberry Pi would sit almost completely idle all the time, so a Heata server, with its inherently server-grade reliability, resiliency and availability would be an excellent platform to host it in your own house with no noticeable impact on the server's performance in its primary role. Also, this integration could help both the "home" owner and Heata if they agree to share the data that would allow Heata to better predict how much heat will be needed and thus how much work to assign to the unit and thus use the unit to its full potential and minimize the need to use the other method(s) of heating.

[sinhasuvam]

LTT had this idea years ago. Whole room water cooling and others. Great to see that this is being commercialized. Crypto miners also tried to do this before.

[jrisner]

Brilliant that someone is commercialising this at small scale, just great!

[jooptablet]

This is ingenious, hope it works out!

[Nikoo]

I can already hear the crazy numpties going: “Bill Gates again, watching us in our houses” “COVID is transmitted via this equipment into our hot water” 😂

[PaulADAigle]

So distributed computing. Nice.
Over a decade ago, I developed the concept of trying to make use of the excess heat produced by computers/CPUs to capture energy from the heat. I envisioned a solar panel-style material for the capture, but I wasn't knowledgeable enough. I was working at Microsoft at the time and asked a coworker's opinion. He shrugged it off as "can't be done". I filed away the concept and moved on.
It never occurred to me to distribute the computing rather than the heat. Glorious!

[keiththompson]

This is already happening at my local leasure centre, a data bank is heating the swimming pool. Just Google Exmouth LED Heating to read all about it. This was the first in the UK back in March 2023. Saves 62% of gas use, saving £30K in costs.

[SebastianSchleussner]

The only pity with the video is that neither the interviewer nor the animator (nor he himself, although he does hesitate) caught the interviewee's blooper "Watt per hour" @ 2:50.

[martinwray]

I'm cool with this as long as the bytes from the data don't interfere with my bits in the bath.

[blairjayson]

This is a great idea. Also use the water heater as a source for the home heat pump (for heating, in winter).

[SteliosPapadopoulos]

Interesting idea! My question would be: how much will heata pay per kWh? If you have PV and hourly tariffs this can be complicated very quickly....