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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if a old server can be used for heating...like literally exhaust the air into a duct and pipe it into the desired room

..In that context crazy inefficient boxes make way more sense. Esp with the reduced e-waste contribution

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Yep, it can. Although you would want the server to be spending time doing something productive rather than just idling or spinning worthless cycles

There are people who use GPUs and ASICs mining cryptocurrency as heaters for greenhouses. Spending the energy on crypto mining is basically a way to recoup some of your energy costs. https://cointelegraph.com/news/cryptomatoes-grows-5-acres-of...

>doing something productive rather than just idling or spinning worthless cycles

Saw a site recently that loans out home GPUs for tensorflow airbnb style. Nifty idea

(don't recall the name sorry)

Qarnot?

This is exactly what I will be doing next month. Moving into a house with electric heating, so I'll leave my desktop and home server on to mine cryptocurrency most of the time. Since the electricity will be effectively "free", I can make some profit. And since I can also deduct electricity used from taxed income (in my jurisdiction, "expenses for the production of income") that should in itself reduce heating costs around 25-30%.

They make water heaters now that use ambient heat in a room to transfer that heat to the water — I believe they’re essentially heat pumps. Maybe you could put your water heater in a closet with the server and make use of some of the wasted energy.

Using it only as a heater would be a bad idea. Heat pumps are much much more efficient than resistance heaters which your server would be.

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