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.