
“Data Furnace” Would Heat Homes While Flipping Bits - davidedicillo
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/25/data-furnace-would-heat-homes-while-flipping-bits/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29
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sbierwagen
It's conceptually identical to electrical heating: an electrical heater is
100% "efficient", in that for every thousand watts of electricity it consumes,
it produces a thousand watts of heat.

A "data furnace" would be cheaper per watt of heat produced, if you could find
someone to pay you to perform computationally expensive tasks; with the
downside of significant upfront cost, and ongoing maintenance. (Replacing
fans, harddrives, etc; while an electric baseboard heater is more or less
maintenance free.)

Except it's supposed to be a replacement for central forced-air furnaces, not
baseboard heaters; which means it's directly competing with MicroCHP[1] in
both up-front price and form-factor; a comparison it's going to lose,
price/heat-watt wise.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_combined_heat_and_power>

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Udo
Exactly. I've always wondered why large data centers are not used to heat the
office space they are housed in. Last winter, I visited a data center in
Norway and was kind of stunned when they answered my question about the excess
heat with "oh, we just blow it again out through the aircon duct". By re-using
the heat energy of a server farm, you're essentially using the same amount of
electricity twice - this should be a real no-brainer (especially considering
all those companies who are currently in the process of making their office
towers "green").

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bbgm
I don't know if they still do it, but back in the day, I believe that's
exactly what they did at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, or at least
that's what we were told when I got a chance to see Mario, Jaromir, etc
(supercomputers not hockey players) in the late 90's

