Free heating by computers
Heat and consumption are enemies of computers. But even this bad master can be turned into a good servant. Have you ever been kidding about heating your room with your computer in the winter? It does not have to be a joke anymore because there have been attempts in the world to commercialize this use of computing power.
Some large data centers or supercomputers are already trying to exploit the waste heat. It is possible to heat a house with it and there are already companies that want to use it on a larger scale. The point is to place a server into a home, where the heat is desired, instead of some data center. The business model could be that the company pays for the electricity consumption and the service becomes basically free for households. This is exactly what Qarnot and Nerdalize are doing to get this idea into practice.
It could be a very nice symbiosis. The heat is unwanted in a server room, of course, and the price for electricity consumed is increased because of the consumption of a required cooling system. But if you put this heat “out”, into residential buildings for example, it can be even useful and you get rid of it cheaply. There just have to be enough system load to make the servers heat properly.
Qarnot offers installments of wall-mounted heaters (500-watt servers) consisting of three Ryzen 7 or Core i7 processors sealed in a large aluminum radiator. Qarnot clients rent out their computing power; the consumption is monitored and Qarnot pays for the energy accordingly. It also provides other services: Wi-Fi, temperature, humidity and CO2 concentration sensors, and phone battery charging. It even detects the presence of strangers when you are not at home, or recognizes when kids return from school.
Another company, Nerdalize, is building a similar network in Netherlands (so far only in some areas, probably because they want to ensure a high-quality connection). Just like Qarnot, it sells computing performance and time, but heat is used to heat domestic water in this case. Instead of a computer heater, you have a computer boiler, perhaps again for free for the host.
If such systems could heat our houses and water really for free (or cheaply), we would not get angry, right? However, it is still not perfect and without any problems. A quite fundamental constraint is the changing of seasons: we do not need to heat homes in the summer, but customers are hardly going to adapt to a limited computing performance services that are available only for a part of the year. This problem might be fixed by distribution of heating servers to different localities (theoretical use of even distribution in the southern and northern hemisphere) or in areas where heating is required always. When it’s hot, servers run in power-saving modes. Hot water is used every day so no problem for Nerdalize.
Also, a fast connection is essential, so villages might be excluded. Or maintenance: if you need to fix or upgrade something, you have to rely just on technician visiting your home. And you can end up without heating system when the company bankrupts. But if it becomes a common cheap service, there might be a problem to find enough clients that would cover the required performance (heating) demand.
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- Free heating by computers
