The newest home tech - a data furnace?

[begreen]

This is too wild. Imagine heating your home with 100 motherboards.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/business/data-furnaces-could-bring-heat-to-homes.html

 

[midwestcoast]

Pretty cool, er, warm... From logistics point of view I could see the district heating model taking off since it could use the current data center configuration. Much smarter than moving the centers to the arctic as seems to be a trend.

 

[begreen]

Google actually built a hydro plant locally and installed a server farm up near it. There are server farms that draw more power than the local municipalities, no kidding.

 

[nate379]

We have two big server racks in the room where I work. I have never noticed them to be hot, or even really warm. I'm sure they put off some heat, but it's not heating our small office, maybe 600 sq ft.

 

[mayhem]

Odds are good that the room is more air conditioned than you realize it is. My server room at my last job had two racks for servers, about 75% populated and the stuff ran so hot that I had to have a 100,000 btu air conditioning system installed. Once the compressor fan failed and the room went up to 120 in less than an hour's time. The room was about 12x14 and I removed some of the ceiling tiles to open the airspace above the ceiling and make the room bigger.

The place I'm at now just has a couple servers that run a half dozen virtual machines. When they're running hard the exhaust air from the primary cooling fans is almost too hot to touch...its the warmest room in the building.

 

[spirilis]

Yeah server rooms often have supplemental cooling going on... I read somewhere that as a rule of thumb you need no active cooling (warm air conducting its heat through the walls is sufficient) up until about 400W worth of power usage. I keep some computer equipment in the walk-in-closet in the center of my house and when I had 2 machines going (along with the wifi AP, network switch, external backup hard drive and my Verizon Wireless Network Extender) it would get toasty warm in there. The Kill-A-Watt measured around ~220-320W sustained power usage. I've since axed the more power-hungry computer and it's around 120W total now and much cooler in there.

I do like the idea they're getting at though. A data center company paying for the electricity while you reap the benefits of the heat. Brilliant!
Just so long as this is built inside sound-proof cabinets (maybe a small A/C unit to pipe the heat into the house)...

 

[jharkin]

W have many server rooms. One of them that we affectionately call the "Science Museum" its our test system lab that holds 300+ desktop boxes in a room about 100ft long. When the AC goes down on occasion its a HUGE problem - once it happened on a weekend and some of the cases literally started to melt. We lost 10s of thousands worth of gear. When it does happen they have to open up all the doors and bring out these enormous shop fans that look like they could fill a hot air balloon blowing out into the corridors. Ive always wondered how much money we could save redirecting that heat into the HVAC system in winter.

 

[nate379]

We lost the heat last week and it was 55* until the heat was fixed. Only reason it stayed that temp is because the rest of the building was 70* and we kept the door open to let some heat in.
The racks we have are 2.5ftx3ft and 8 ft tall. 2 of them.

I'm sure a large data center/room would make lots of heat, but if you have even a 12x14 room to do so that's a good sized "boiler room". My boiler room is a corner of the garage and it's about 4ftx6ft. Has the boiler, water heater and water softener in there.

Odds are good that the room is more air conditioned than you realize it is. My server room at my last job had two racks for servers, about 75% populated and the stuff ran so hot that I had to have a 100,000 btu air conditioning system installed. Once the compressor fan failed and the room went up to 120 in less than an hour's time. The room was about 12x14 and I removed some of the ceiling tiles to open the airspace above the ceiling and make the room bigger.

The place I'm at now just has a couple servers that run a half dozen virtual machines. When they're running hard the exhaust air from the primary cooling fans is almost too hot to touch...its the warmest room in the building.

 

[btuser]

It would take a lot of porn to heat my house.