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Free heat in germany

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13 Nov ’14 - 9:12 am

that's a pretty innovative idea

Another polar vortex may or may not be on its way, but winter means heat bills no matter what. Unless, of course, you get your heat for free from a cabinet full of servers that's sitting in your living room. If you live in Germany, it’s possible!

Cloud&Heat is a cloud infrastructure company that has started distributing its servers to people who want to store them in exchange for free heat in their homes or offices. Since serversgenerate so much excess heat and cloud companies have to spend a lot to cool them, the idea to repurpose the waste heat isn't new. In fact, Qarnot, a French cloud company, is working on a similar program to Cloud&Heat’s. But as Datacenter Dynamics reports, Cloud&Heat is ahead in terms of implementing the idea.

Customers pay to have a Cloud&Heat fire-proof cabinet installed in their homes or offices (the cost is comparable to installing a standard heating system). Then Cloud&Heat pays for the electricity and Internet service the cabinet needs and the owner gets to enjoy free heat and hot water. Plus Cloud&Heat has some clever fixes in place. If the servers do heavy data processing when no one needs the heat, the system stores hot water in a “buffering tank.” And the Cloud&Heat cabinets can also vent outside in the spring and summer.

Security is a concern with these setups, because anyone’s data could be in anyone else’s house at a given time, but Cloud&Heat claims that since all of its data is encrypted and only its employees can open the cabinets that everyone’s information is safe. Still, it's more reassuring to think that your data is stored in a remote server farm than in someone’s house.

If you’ve ever had the fan on your laptop go totally nuts, though, you know that heat from electronics is significant, and it makes sense to do something productive with it.

http://www.slate.com....._them.html

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29 May ’15 - 11:16 am

Looks like this is catching on

What costs between €400 and €500 (£290 and £360) to set up, requires a fibre-optic connection, is sold by a company that has the uncoolest name ever, and provides 1000 watts of free heating forever? The Nerdalize eRadiator, which is now being rolled out to households in the Netherlands.

Back in 2011, Microsoft Research published a research paper on the topic of data furnaces. The concept was simple. Microsoft has a lot of servers, mostly sitting in large data centres, producing huge amounts of heat—heat that is a massive nuisance to deal with. Instead of venting that heat into the environment (and spending a fortune in the process), why not do something useful with it?

Finding ways of dealing with waste heat from data centres and supercomputers has been a hot topic over the past few years, primarily due to the huge costs involved. Cooling a large installation of computers can account for a large percentage (upwards of 30 percent) of day-to-day operating costs.

Way back in 2008, IBM installed a data centre in Zurich that uses waste heat to warm a nearby town's swimming pool. In 2011, Google built a data centre in Finland that uses cold sea water for cooling. Facebook has a facility in Lulea, Sweden, on the edge of the Arctic Circle, that is powered entirely by hydroelectricity—and the reliably cold outside air reduces cooling costs considerably, too. Most of the Web's larger service providers, which stand to gain the most from such solutions, are in the process of setting up these "green" (i.e. more energy efficient) data centres.