Yeah, I’ve been saying we should make crypto mining space heaters. I don’t think there’s much of a market for it, but it’s an interesting thought. Worst case, it would be an amazing gag gift.
Or, if you believe all crypto is immoral (arguably fair), then make a space heater that runs something like folding at home.
Oh my goodness, YES!
The initial concept developed by the company involved using heat generated by Bitcoin mining rigs, according to Heata Co-founder and CTO Chris Jordan.
“We literally put a Bitcoin miner in a barrel of mineral oil and plumbed it up to a radiator,” he told The Register.
Sadly, for a few years now I’ve had TDP as one of the main criteria when buying parts for my machines, so there really isn’t enough waste heat from my machines to even just keep a room warm in Winter by playing heavy 3D games (the worst machine tops at around 180W with 3D and CPU heavy games - so basically the same heating as a really bright incandescent light bulb - whilst my home server uses about 20W at 100%)
On the other hand what I save in power consumption on my machines can be used on a dedicated heating solution that’s ON only when I need it rather than the whole year.
whilst my home server uses about 20W at 100%)
I’d love it if my equipment used so little, but I’d rather just pay a higher electric bill and be able to spin up whatever VM, container or DB I need for a project whenever I want without having to worry about resource usage
It’s really down to fitting the machine to one’s Requirements, present and forecasted ones.
So my home server is just a N100 Mini PC because it’s just a TV Media Box on my living room that doubles as home NAS and Torrent server with a dedicated VPN connection, for which an N100 with not especially large or fast memory and a decent-sized SSD, is more than powerful enough since the CPU heavy stuff - video decoding - is done in dedicated silicon inside the N100 so doesn’t really run on the CPU cores, whilst the other functionality is mainly bottlenecked by network speeds and my network is just Gigabit Ethernet.
If I expected heavier CPU loads I would have gone with a different CPU (plus associated elements such as motherboard and memory) whilst if I wanted to run the heavier AI stuff (such as image generation) it would’ve been a Desktop PC with a dedicated Graphics Card with lots of video memory.
As it is, my games PC doubles as Image generation machine and also works fine if I want play with VMs or Databases since that’s running Linux and is a lot more powerful in almost every way (curiously, not disk speed since it’s a bit old with upgraded parts, so it’s still using SATA and does not support M.2 disks on PCIe) than that Mini PC.
A machine on my living room is supposed to be quiet (so, no loud fans, hence low power consumption), so I was hardly going to over-dimension that living room TV Box / Server just to once in a while I could play with heavy stuff in it, given that I already have a different and much more powerful Linux machine at home that I can use for that, hence why I partitioned my needs this way and can have an always ON server that just tops at 20W (though generally it uses less than half that power).
PS: Also keep in mind that merely running a database isn’t by itself any kind of heavy load (even for heavy stuff like Oracle, much less mySQL or PostgresSQL), it’s what uses it that dictates the load, so even running a DB there is not an issue unless I’m doing tons of massive non-indexed queries against it (or huge dataset indexed ones, since non-indexed ones on huge datasets end up disk bound unless you have insane amounts of memory) or a similar pattern of usage.
My home server was serving a dual purpose of keeping my closet full of 3d printer filament dry, but then the most recent TrueNAS Scale updates killed it by dropping my average CPU load from 10 to 4%.
Relevant xkcd:
ALWAYS. A. RELEVANT. XKCD.
Just open a few Chrome tabs. That’ll ramp the resource usage back up again.
He didn’t say he wanted to make another sun
Does ram really have that much thermal load/power draw? I don’t even account for it when I’m picking a power supply.
Just start a scan with a second anti-virus, they’ll fight it out and warm up your house quite nicely.
Or double dip and mine crypto when it’s cold out.
Even for a large amount of RAM that you’d find in a big server, it’s a few dozen watts at most. Here’s some charts showing the jump from DDR3 to DDR4 on a 16GB stick:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ddr3l-vs-ddr4-power-consumption.2012014/
DDR5 dropped the voltage from 1.2V to 1.1V compared to DDR4, which tends to make it even more power efficient. Not quite as dramatic as DDR3 to 4, but in any case, it’s better still.
Those bastards.
I saw an interesting post that said
All electronics are 100% efficient in the winter
Now that we have reverse cycle AC (heat pumps), 100% is a low bar.
I know, but I didn’t wanna pollute my comment with a bunch of pedantry, despite my name. Also people living in apartments often don’t have access to heat pumps.
Love my heat pump, although its not AC. In the UK if you get ground/air to water the government give you £7.5k towards it. Air to air you get nothing. I suppose it is quieter, but for the 2/3 days in summer where it goes over 30°c having AC would be nice.
I’ve heard tell of mystery tech to make the water heat pumps make cold. I’m sure I’ll be more tempted to investigate further when summer comes.
I live in the UK, its always humid. You will end up with a condensation radiator.
Yeah, that’s the issue to be solved. Apparently there is some sort of contraption that includes fans to prevent the condensation, but whenever I asked the heat pump people they just shook their heads despndently and told me to let it go.
Hey, all my pipes are outside the walls. Maybe I can just build some sort of acrylic enclosure and put fish in there or something.
If you want a janky setup for it I have one for you and its probably slightly better than the fish tank condensation collector. Turn your heating to full power, then connect the heat pump to a tube that takes the cool air and directs it to you.
Optional: Watercool your sofa by putting a few PC rads next to the heat pump and they pump water round a hose pipe on your sofa. Turn off the radiator in the room you want cooling in.
I have been kinda thinking of the hosepipe watercooled sofa idea myself though without using the heat pump for it, just a bucket of water and a pump, put some ice cubes into the bucket. Or freeze a 2L bottle and put that in. Avoid thermoelectric, its inefficient. Passive cooling or perhaps make use of cooler underground temperature are also interesting thoughts. But in reality I doubt I will end up doing something like it and it just remains in the idea phase.
Hah. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. The outside unit is right besides the window to my home office and I could get some nice overclocking going with a tube and some tape by just opening the hot water.
You could probably gat away with it if you install a single mini split somewhere upstairs to remove moisture and cool the rest of the house with the big pump
Back in high school, my buddy used to VNC into his Athlon 3200+ WinXP machine from school and start SuperPi calculating a million digits. Took 40minutes and got his room proper toasty by time he got home.
My server rack (in the cold garage) is now enclosed and the air filtered and piped into my grow tent which then regulates with cold air from the garage.
my grow tent
One of these days I also need to get around to starting my grow operation myself lol
I’m just kinda hunkering down with carts and waiting for MN to get dispensaries cause I’m lazy.
I was given some white widow clones and unfortunately could only keep them outdoors most of the time. Meant some generally early harvesting. I’m ready this year lol
That’s the dream right there.
I love my gaming PC and 3d printer in the winter. Keeps my room toasty without me needing to run the heat much at all.
I hate those same things in the summer when I gotta have fans or AC just so I don’t melt lol
Shit with my gf and I both gaming, sometimes we have to open a window in the winter
I turn off Folding@Home in the summer. Otherwise it’s on 24x7.
Wow f@h still kicking?
For everyone who isn’t trying to mine crypto, yeah.
Is there any way to store surplus waste heat for redistribution months later? The only thing I can think of is just a really large, high heat capacity mass surrounded by incredible insulation material, with a heat pump system built in to it. Which would be incredibly impractical.
You just described a water heater.
One that would potentially store heat at super dangerous pressures of steam granted.
Just have a safety vent. But I thought they cooled off within days, not months?
Look into geothermal heat pumps. During the summer they pump heat from your house underground, and during the winter they pump it back in.
But the energy doesn’t really stay there. The thermal mass and temperature of the ground just means that you can always efficiently take heat from it or effectively dump heat into it. Always predictably the same efficiency.
If the heat was actually stored, the start of summer and winner the pump would be super efficient, but by the end it’d be inefficient working hard to move the heat. So it seems kinda wasteful that the energy isn’t being stored, but it’s actually kinda better that it isn’t.
Here me out: a global computing cooperative –
Collectively owned servers and gaming PCs are run at max power wherever it’s winter at the time, streaming the data to where it is needed.Lookup Folding @ Home or boinc. It’s basically the same thing.
So it sends data to/from a remote place? A place that’s probably far away, kinda like those fluffy-looking things in the sky? May I suggest that you name your idea “cloud computing”?
There, you’re out.
That’s a lot of bandwidth, but it sounds like a good idea.
I mean data center excess heat is already used for district heating and that’s a shared resource. Not free or communal computing resource though.
Huh, I hadn’t heard about this idea and a quick search on DDG returned this link: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/08/sustainable-data-centre-heating/
Interesting!
Electricity generated heat from your servers is incredibly inefficient compared to a heat pump.
Yes, but im already using the computer for other things and it would be more inefficient to double up on heating sources. I can confirm from personal expirence a PC in a small room can sufficently act as climate control.
Conversely it’s exactly as efficient as a resistive heater, which lots of people still use.
Interesting thought experiment - is a pc exactly as efficient as a resistive space heater? In a pc some tiny amount of electricity is converted to light and sound and kinetic energy instead of heat. But then again, don’t those other forms of energy just eventually just turn back into heat again? Hmmm…
Yes, it all eventually becomes heat, though not all in the room. Some sound escapes, and some light goes through the window or whatever. Those losses are incredibly minor though.
What makes a big difference between a PC and something purpose built as a heater is generally how the air circulates the room. A space heater is going to project it out into the room, baseboard heaters will create a wide convection current. A PC on a desk in the corner will typically just blast hot air at one localised spot on the wall which isn’t really ideal for dispersing it throughout the room.
You guys have your PCs’ backs to a wall? I’ve always put it away from the wall.
What if I reverse the direction of my fans (in from the backside and out from the front) and point it to face the middle of the room?
I would think actually more efficient because heat is the waste product not the expected product like a stand alone heater. Unless you are specifically running your PC at max just to create heat then just using your PC as intended and gaining “free” heat is a bonus.
You will certainly lose a couple of milliwatts if you have a WiFi antenna on your PC.
The rest will be turned into heat in your room, probably.
Thank you, this thought had occurred to me recently, and I was wondering if it was accurate.
This is true, but it’s shocking how few people have heat pumps, especially in colder climates.
Still, it’s also far less efficient than using a gas furnace (to the point that most people would actually burn more fossil fuels per Joule of heat from a resistive heater than from just burning the gas directly in a furnace).
Of course, if you’re doing something useful with that energy, using the waste heat is an extra benefit. Like using waste heat from a power plant for district heating.
No one is comparing efficiency of a PC as a heating device to a Heat Pump.
So I’m not sure why you felt the need to post this.
Not sure who’s down voting you. You’re right. There’s Heat pumps that can move 5x more heat than the energy they use. While a PC only gives you max 1:1
The efficiency of a heat pump in part comes from the temperature of the heat source. For an air source heat pump it will be more efficient at higher outside temperatures and less efficient and lower outside temperatures, and at extreme temperatures may be less efficient than resistive heating
I interpreted the sentiment from OP that it was just reframing the reality in either case: the server is going to run, and it’s going to generate heat.
You can either frame that reality as “waste heat is being generated” or “my furnace doesn’t have to work as hard”
“Incredibly inefficient” is a bit of an exaggeration, heat pumps typically run at an efficiency of about 2, occasionally 3. It’s better but not by orders of magnitude. Not gonna make much of a difference at 500 watts.
Technically those are orders of magnitude. 2x or 3x efficiency compared to resistive heating is quite a bit. But in the scheme of getting actual heat into an actual home and real world energy costs it’s not a huge difference
I have actually gotten up to run benchmarks on my PC on particularly cold nights.
For the heat and electricity, it’s stunning how much compute I get from my somewhat modern gear vs. my 40U rack of 10-years ago.
People used to mine Bitcointhis was. Only in winter.
my gaming PC literally is a primary heat source in my cold office.
Gaming PCs are about to top out at 1500W, which is a very solid space heater. Honestly, it complements a heat pump just fine. If you can set up a fan pushing air out of your gaming den and/or home server room you’re at least starting to justify your stupidly wasteful setup.
I have to be honest, all the PC master race bros are deep into the awkward monkey puppet meme hoping all the AI haters don’t realize they’re using hardware that can easily run very competent genAI at competitive speeds to play CounterStrike. If you want to make and post that one you have my blessing.
Do you expect me to teabag you in 1080p at 120 Hz like some medieval peasant? My nutsack textures require at least 4K at 240 Hz or else you can’t make out the individual hairs as they brush your nose.
That’s why I like my mini PC with a laptop GPU. Its not the most powerful, but it can play most stuff at 1080p Very High settings and get 60 FPS all while using 300ish watts. Good enough for me. I really don’t want to deal with noise, size and power consumption of a kitted out gaming rig anymore.
This conversation is two steps away from rediscovering the concept of consoles and I’m here for it.
You haven’t heard my PS4 take off like a jet liner on any menu screen.
Hey, it was still a 150W machine.
It was just devoting 100 of those watts to attempting liftoff.
