Install a server in your house, get free hot water!
cnx-software.com
cnx-software.com
My solution? Two giant rack mount servers, running Foldign@Home at full capacity. Way I figured is that it's still 100% efficient at generating heat, but I might as well help drug research in the process.
To the child comment; I’ve told this story in the past but the tldr of it was that I was (unknowingly) not paying for the electricity in my apartment due to a broken meter. I didn’t break it, and I didn’t know it was broken; I just thought power was really cheap in NYC.
I'm further skeptical at the claim of a dedicated fiber line being installed just for this server (having been on the receiving side of fiber install quotes with 5-6 digits) - and even more skeptical at the claim of using 4G/5G connections for servers.
I'll believe it when I see it... but it reads like it was written by someone that really doesn't have a grasp of what we're dealing with here.
Re: fiber, Natural gas lines often already have a fiber line for monitoring (some US utils were the first to the fiber market because of this)
Regarding keeping the existing heating element - seems necessary because this server water heater isn't going to heat much of anything.
To flip it on it's head - this is free cooling capacity for a for-profit server company that will do little-to-zero for the home owner and risks damaging their expensive water heater for some hand-wavy promised savings of $200 a year... not really selling me.
There is no reality where this server "heater" can replace a natural gas or electricity line - so the comparison is moot.
Further, fiber lines are owned by an entity. This private, for-profit company is not going to be able to just use someone else's fiber lines simply because they are nearby.
Even further, bringing a fiber line even across a building can run thousands or tens of thousands. Across a street? Try a hundred thousand... I've been here many times with fiber, ie. there's nothing cheap about it, all of it.
There is no reality where this server company is going to shell out tens of thousands to run fiber lines to a bunch of one-off installations.
Many gas companies have already entrenched fiber when performing maintenance on consumer gas lines for monitoring stations. Fiber is shallower and is easy to trench relative to gas lines. It also serves as an early warning sign when digging.
It simply does not make economic sense. Like I said before - I strongly suspect the entire truth is not being told about this arrangement.
Also, I don't think you just get one fiber(?), I have 4 fiber ports on my wall outlet, which was quite useful when I changed ISPs (that didn't share the same fiber) : only a few seconds of downtime, to switch Ethernet cables and Wi-Fi !
Also, unless you have solar thermal hot water, this sounds to be the perfect use case, thanks to the large inertia... (I wonder how they interface with the off-hours cheap electricity? This seems to be up to a constant 200W, ~100W guaranteed ?)
The concern I have here is that despite the "patented heating element", this sounds to be a hacky solution that might compromise the insulation too much. They really need to build those in the water heater to start with ! (And provide regular service against failure from rust, since a leaky heater might have more dire consequences here.)
How much of my hot water will it deliver?
A useful base load. If the heata unit ran all day it would deliver about 4.8kWh of hot water which is about the amount of hot water an average household uses. In practice the utilisation level will be lower and sometimes the water will be at temperature so the heata unit won't be able to run. We think it could deliver up to 80% of an average household's hot water, with good compute utilisation. This trial will help us learn more about how this will work in practice and enable us to give you a useful amount of free hot water at the same time.
Will you use my broadband?
Yes, we will connect to your broadband to communicate with the units. We'll directly connect to your router to avoid WiFi interference and most of the time the unit will simply be sending some monitoring information (temperatures / fan speeds etc) back to base, so you shouldn't notice any impact. We'll occasionally perform speed tests, and limit any larger uploads and downloads to a fraction of this so we'll never use too much of your bandwidth. We'll also schedule these overnight so it shouldn't affect your daytime speeds. Our intention is that you won't notice - one of the things we'll be doing during the trial is getting your feedback on if we've achieved this. In the future we plan to install a dedicated fibre or 4G/5G connection for the heata unit.
They specifically say that they run speed tests and then restrict their usage to a fraction of your speed. So no.
> Isn't running a regular server (not home media server) rate limited/outright banned in the TOS of most home internet service providers?
Don't think of it as a server. Think of it as a PC that is running all the time. These TOS you're thinking of are usually to prevent you running services that can be connected to like web servers and smtp servers. For all we know, this machine doesn't listen for incoming connections and just makes outgoing connections. Just like your phones browser is doing. Your phone isn't a server banned by your ISP's TOS is it?
And if it does use the internet, it's now using your internet (and presumably your electricity) for free. Seems heavily lopsided in the company's favor, geared towards selling suckers on feeling good about "helping" the environment when you are really just helping some company make money.
It doesn't say that. It says that it will use your broadband connection. It says most of the time it will just be for monitoring and speed tests, and it also says that larger uploads/downloads will be limited to a fraction of your bandwidth and they'll try to run it overnight.
To me, this says they'll send/retrieve datasets to be processed on the server, slowly, mostly overnight.
> It is in direct contradiction to what the author of the article wrote
Yes. I don't know why he wrote it, but if you click through to the trial on https://www.heata.co/trial and scroll down to the FAQ, it is right there.
> And if it does use the internet, it's now using your internet (and presumably your electricity) for free
I think maybe you need to read the FAQ. They see how much electricity they're using by installing a meter for this specific purpose, and they pay you for it.
This doesn't seem very useful at all. Other than to get feel-good enviro points, and even then it's still highly questionable.
If it can only use a small fraction of your bandwidth, and it can only do it at night - then who is this thing for? What kind of profitable compute keeps it occupied all day and only checks in at night?
I highly suspect the entire truth is not being told here with this idea. It sounds like a half-baked college student idea more than a professional operation.
Ultimately, it will be costing them money to create this hardware, install it in your house, and then pay you for the electricity it uses. It seems likely to me that they'll have considered a way of making money from it.
[edit] I investigated further and one of the things they do on these machines is 3D rendering.
My skepticism is more about the economics around this.
These aren't being used as web servers and the like. The intention is to take batch jobs and run them - computer modelling etc. The data can easily be downloaded overnight over even a relatively modest connection.
I could imagine a future where every house has something like this partially heating their water and air before the real heating system is applied.
This is really important.
Where I live - Oslo, Norway - we have a sun thermal collector-thingy[0] on the roof which _aids_ in heating up other stuff. Surely, it needs to be a fire nearby to heat the water enough to have a comfortable shower, but we save approx. $20K yearly[1] on energy costs with this solution.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_collector
[1] I live in a housing association with 60 other families in the same building, so needless to say the savings would be a lot less if I lived on my own in one house. :)
The only problem is in hot months where that extra heat needs to be removed from the living space.
Some inner house heat pump solution could collect that air heat and concentrate it in the water tank.
[1] https://www.j-lpgas.gr.jp/en/appliances/
(Interesting aside: some people in Japan combine these with a solar/battery array to achieve robust all-season off grid self sufficiency, without combustion, which I think is quite neat!)
[1] https://www.keysenergy.com/typical-electric-usage-of-various...
can't find any specs on what kind of compute power each physical installation would provide
[1] - https://www.leaf.cloud
EDIT: fixed link
Distributed compilation of large code bases, offline rendering, baking lighting for AAA, media transcoding.
Basically, anything batch-style that doesn't demand reliable latency and can tolerate some amount of failure in the cluster.
But using house heat pumps to cool air / heat water in the summer could at least decrease energy use during the day; and then in the winter, the water (as a heat source) can help assist older heat pumps in pumping heat from the cold (though modern heat pumps solve this problem)
https://sustainability.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/FB_...
Here is an article from 2020 in German presenting the computer rack as a heating system. http://www.energiesparhaushalt.de/1/intelligent-heizen-durch...
It looks like they didn't got much interest in the market and pivoted more to industrial customers. The main purpose now is not a computer node as a heating, but instead recovering the waste heat from computer rack for the heating system.
I've read before that if you run the loops "backwards", such that the two loops of the heat exchanger are flowing in opposite directions, that you can increase the rate of heat transfer by maximizing the difference in temperature.
Has anybody done this before?
This setup is very efficient at heat transfer, and can counter-intuitively produce a higher output temperature than the counterflow's input temperature.
I’ve found tech driven heating to work quite well though. For small apartments you really don’t need all that much output if it’s 24/7
> the answer is no, as we are told the server uses its own connection which will either be its own dedicated fiber line or a 4G/5G connection.
I wonder how that worked out, given the development of energy prices...
Given that fiber setup, the gas company has a low latency network.
How much of my hot water will it deliver?
A useful base load. If the heata unit ran all day it would deliver about 4.8kWh of hot water which is about the amount of hot water an average household uses. In practice the utilisation level will be lower and sometimes the water will be at temperature so the heata unit won't be able to run. We think it could deliver up to 80% of an average household's hot water, with good compute utilisation. This trial will help us learn more about how this will work in practice and enable us to give you a useful amount of free hot water at the same time.