News Heata Offers UK Residents Free Hot Water in Exchange for Cooling Its Servers

[Admin]

Heata is offering UK residents (some) free hot water (for a year), heated by one of the company's servers (installed in your home).

Heata Offers UK Residents Free Hot Water in Exchange for Cooling Its Servers : Read more

 

[Amdlova]

That's cool. You have to spare some room. Nobreak / server/ New power lines / New broadband you cannot use. In the end you can have warmer water.
Every one need a cluster in your house. Lol

 

[USAFRet]

"Okay, it's only 4.8kWh/day, and it's only for a year. And also you have to let them install a server in your house. And maybe use your broadband."

And what, in the fine print, tells you what information YOU give up in the process.

 

[TechieTwo]

There are plenty of gullible people in the world.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Sucker born every minute

 

[edzieba]

A neat idea, but no good for most who have already switched to combi-boilers and gotten rid of inefficient hot water tank systems.

 

[gg83]

The idea is awesome! We could eventually make something like this work. We have a lot of wasted energy as heat in our daily lives. Even if we could convert 10% of waste energy into a usable form.

 

[BillyBuerger]

Yeah, this isn't a bad idea, but I feel like it would be more efficient in things like apartment buildings where you could actually have a room full of servers where the heat could be used for the whole complex instead of just one server at one house. Or in an office building. Something larger scale. Maybe that's the plan and they're just trying to prove it out on individuals. But there's also the security part of it. How can they ensure these systems that are in individuals houses can't be tampered with and the potential of data being compromised or systems being stolen.

 

[bit_user]

I've heard of heat/power co-generation plants, where they take the "waste" steam from natural gas power turbines and route it through a campus for heating. This is kinda similar, but at the power consumption end.

Microsoft's new data center in Finland reported that it would be directing its waste heat to warm the homes of local residents, covering approximately 40% of the heating needs for 250,000 people. And a data center in Hokkaido, Japan last year was reportedly using heated waste water in an eel farm.

I was thinking it'd be interesting to locate a datacenter near a city, where you could actually pipe the waste heat into buildings, during the winter. That only provides efficiencies during the winter, though. Maybe there are some industrial applications for server waste heat, but I'm not sure how much of it would be on datacenter scale. I don't imagine an eel farm takes a significant fraction of datacenter waste heat, but maybe it's a really big eel farm.

BTW, I wonder how much energy you could recover from datacenter waste heat. Especially if it were located somewhere with plenty of water, so you could use evaporative cooling.

 

[bit_user]

We have a lot of wasted energy as heat in our daily lives. Even if we could convert 10% of waste energy into a usable form.

Exactly. It feels like such a waste when I'm running the heater and thinking "I could actually be using this energy to do something useful". That's why I like the idea of co-generation, for instance.

It would probably be a lot more compelling, were residential heating not already being subsidized by the government.

But there's also the security part of it. How can they ensure these systems that are in individuals houses can't be tampered with and the potential of data being compromised or systems being stolen.

Modern CPUs support memory encryption. So, even having physical access to the machine doesn't mean you'll be able to monitor or manipulate what it's running.

Regarding theft of the hardware, I wonder if the home owner needs to pay a deposit on it. That would be the cleanest way, but it seems a big ask for them to put down a deposit of probably a couple $k, only to receive $200 worth of free hot water per year. But, at least that way, if the home is burglarized, the home owner goes through their insurance to recoup their deposit, rather than the service needing to worry about who/how/why the server disappeared.

 

[USAFRet]

The idea is awesome! We could eventually make something like this work. We have a lot of wasted energy as heat in our daily lives. Even if we could convert 10% of waste energy into a usable form.

The idea is good. Waste industrial heat to warm residential.
This particular implementation, not.

They want to install a server in my house? And use my internet connection?
Not even a little bit.
"Trust us, it is secure." yeah, right.

 

[Batweasel]

I might have missed something, but how are they going to cool a server by attaching it to a hot water tank? My tank is hot most of the time; it's well insulated. Surely they want cold water into a heat exchange of some sort, then you get hot water out.

Effectively they'll be attaching their server to a 60°C heat source. A quick google suggests that there are certainly processors that run hotter than that at full load, but I'm not sure how much heat they'll be able to transfer with a relatively small temperature delta.

As I say, I might have missed something.

 

[bill001g]

I might have missed something, but how are they going to cool a server by attaching it to a hot water tank? My tank is hot most of the time; it's well insulated. Surely they want cold water into a heat exchange of some sort, then you get hot water out.

Effectively they'll be attaching their server to a 60°C heat source. A quick google suggests that there are certainly processors that run hotter than that at full load, but I'm not sure how much heat they'll be able to transfer with a relatively small temperature delta.

As I say, I might have missed something.

This is also what I wondered. I could see it working with those tankless systems that only heat water when you need it but they talk about a tank size. You would think a server would more or less produce heat on a constant basis. If they hooked it to the cold water inlet then it would only get cooling when you were actually consuming hot water. They would need some kind of small pump to take water out of the hot water tank run it though the server and then put it back. That would mean you were always "cooling" the cpu with hot water. It would also need a pretty strong pump since a hot water tank is under a lot more pressure than the cooling systems you see in a pc. The pipes would also have to be well insulated or else you would just lose the heat to the air as the hot water went back and forth to the tank.

This more seems like one of those silly ideas you see on tv shows that someone is trying to get money for that will never actually become a real product.

 

[edzieba]

I might have missed something, but how are they going to cool a server by attaching it to a hot water tank? My tank is hot most of the time; it's well insulated. Surely they want cold water into a heat exchange of some sort, then you get hot water out.

Effectively they'll be attaching their server to a 60°C heat source. A quick google suggests that there are certainly processors that run hotter than that at full load, but I'm not sure how much heat they'll be able to transfer with a relatively small temperature delta.

As I say, I might have missed something.

Cool the system with cold inlet water, dump warm outlet water into hot water tank. Open loop. No need to have the main central heating system running to do this, and if you need to 'dump' warm water from the hot water tank when the central heating loop is off to prevent overflow then you have only 'lost' heat that would be wasted anyway.

 

[bill001g]

Cool the system with cold inlet water, dump warm outlet water into hot water tank. Open loop. No need to have the main central heating system running to do this, and if you need to 'dump' warm water from the hot water tank when the central heating loop is off to prevent overflow then you have only 'lost' heat that would be wasted anyway.

A hotwater tank is not a open system. Only so much water will fit in the tank no matter the temperature of the water. Where are you going to dump warm water, down the sewer. Maybe they could just pay you for water and constantly dump it down the drain instead.

 

[bit_user]

Cool the system with cold inlet water, dump warm outlet water into hot water tank. Open loop.

That's how I assumed it worked, at first.

No need to have the main central heating system running to do this, and if you need to 'dump' warm water from the hot water tank when the central heating loop is off to prevent overflow then you have only 'lost' heat that would be wasted anyway.

It's not only lost heat, though. You're basically saying it should dump warm water down the sewer? That wastes too much water.