

Heat Your Home with Data - uptown
https://medium.com/re-form/heat-your-home-with-data-ab27fe7d6f01

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Rury
Wow is this such a bad article. I'm still not even sure what exactly Orsini
and his startup aim to accomplish.

"That’s the basic idea behind Orsini’s startup, Project Exergy: rather than
transporting electricity across power lines to generate our heat — and wasting
most of the power in the process — Exergy proposes that households and
business can generate the heat they need onsite, using computation"

Computation uses electricity...

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captn3m0
I have AdDetector extension installed and it gave me a prominent warning at
the top of the page saying:

>[AdDetector] This page is an ad paid for by BMW

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TTPrograms
I've thought through this idea a few times (cloud processing in people's homes
for heating). It's pretty hard to make the economics work out. You can bring
down hardware costs using older processor tech, which is ok since you don't
care about efficiency. Alternately you put a shit ton of mobile phone
processors on a board. You also need some really advanced software systems if
you want to do any real processing and be robust to random failure of nodes. I
haven't run the numbers, but I'm skeptical. Cryptomining doesn't seem like a
sufficient return these days, and if you're using electricity over gas it's a
total no-go.

It's the sort of idea that my physics background loves (why the hell are we
turning so much energy straight into entropy all the time instead of doing
useful work first?) but pragmatically it doesn't seem to work out.

As a side note, if you want to be fun at parties talk about your computer as
your new 100% efficient space heater :)

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lutorm
The article is so bad I can't tell whether they are somehow arguing that
computers should be made "more efficient" at making heat (news flash, they are
already 100% efficient at that) or whether it's an infrastructure proposal
where they are arguing that data centers should be farmed out into peoples
homes and thus keep them warm...

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teraflop
I'm not reassured by the fact that it links to
[http://ramblings.jamestindall.info/post/102216847/1mb-1-lump...](http://ramblings.jamestindall.info/post/102216847/1mb-1-lump-
of-coal) as a source. That page manages to overestimate the energy cost of
data transmission by _9 orders of magniture_ by confusing milliwatt-hours with
megawatt-hours.

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SwellJoe
"Data" doesn't make (much) heat. Data processing might. Calculation certainly
does.

I heat some of my house with cryptocurrency miners (which are not cost-
effective to run during warm months, but in the winter are as effective as
space heaters, and slightly offset their cost to operate with cryptocurrency
returns). If there were a service that provided computation for a few and paid
people with big GPUs to run it, that'd be really cool. I'd like for my
computers to be doing something a bit more useful to the world than "proof-of-
work" for a handful of also-ran cryptocurrencies. (I also have some Bitcoin
ASICs, but they produce so little revenue that I don't run them anymore, even
in the winter.)

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lutorm
Do the miners also offset their investment cost? It seems that, depending on
how expensive they are, it _may_ be a better solution to just run the space
heater.

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SwellJoe
Did mine? Pretty close to it, at least when Bitcoin was high. Would they
today? Certainly not. I bought my ASICs and within a couple of months had
recouped about 80% of the cost, and probably another 5% in the following
couple of months before I turned them off due to heat. The GPU miners
continued to make a reasonable amount of money by using currency hopping
pools. But, they probably reached only about 65% of being recouped. Now, it
would take a couple of winters to make another 5% back (but, since I'd be
running heaters anyway, it might still work out OK...or, I may still be better
off selling the GPUs, since they are still roughly current generation
technology (I have a mix of R270, R280, and R290). I bought before the demand
drove prices up, but still it was a pretty big chunk of change compared to the
four or five space heaters they could replace.

I certainly don't recommend mining. I got involved partly for the experience,
as I was writing a novel that included Bitcoin oriented stuff, and partly for
the GPU (I wanted a better gaming system anyway, so one 290 was getting
purchased, no matter what), and partly for the gold rush (knowing it was
probably a poor investment).

But, it seems like there _ought_ to be a system that pays people for their GPU
cycles. Though what they'd be doing is up in the air. I can't think of much
that doesn't also require fast communication. Folding@Home and SETI@Home are
cool, but don't pay, which is unfortunate, since I don't run these things
without something offsetting the electrical cost.

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wrcwill
If you are otherwise heating your home using electrical heating, then this is
correct. However, heat pumps are more than 100% "efficient". Using X
electrical energy you can heat your home more than 2X. Don't replace a heat
pump with computers.

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samthedoctor
[http://mobile.eweek.com/servers/german-company-offers-to-
hea...](http://mobile.eweek.com/servers/german-company-offers-to-heat-homes-
with-cloud-servers.html)

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wmf
Microsoft proposed this in 2011:
[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1502...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=150265)

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RankingMember
In the summer I'm guessing heat would just be vented outside, eh?

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alricb
Or used for domestic hot water, which is done in some data centers.

