Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool | Hacker News Reader

Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

bbc.co.uk

56 pointssamwillis11 comments

Linus Tech Tips did a video on this where he ran water cooling from his server room into his pool, thereby heating his pool while simultaneously cooling his servers.

Well it worked for my bedroom with an Athlon X2 twenty years ago.

A Pentium 4 worked much better for heating than an Athlon.

Athlon Thunderbirds were notorious for reaching insane temperatures without any form of thermal throttling -- an uncooled Thunderbird will destroy itself without cooling. The Pentium 4, on the other hand, will throttle down and often keep running if you take the heat sink off.

I guess it's a matter of how efficiently you can cool the CPU with pool water. If you're able to keep the P4 below whatever limit it has for thermal throttling then I suspect it will, indeed, be a winner. If not, a Thunderbird will happily boil away the enire pool if given a chance.

Nice. I've agtually built the "greenest" (I hate the term, but still) possible home mini data-centre in apartment about 10y ago, and it's working flawlessly. I wanted to make a video about it or write an article, but ... gmail have taken away my mail and youtube account and I no longer have a site/blog :-| Anyway, I love it when people reuse heat energy emitted by computers and wish more did like they did. Because most DCs I know still use aircons that just throw away heat 365d/y. Not to mention they consume megawatts by themselves. (

30C swimming pool! That's a hot bath!

Hot? I run ~36°C body temperaturs, and 37°C is "normal"; 40°C is default faucet temperature in many Japanese baths and I don't find it too hot.

Excellent concept, keep it up.

I'd like to do this in America. Anyone got ideas of how to step-by-step?

Good grief. They're using free flowing oil as the cooling medium instead of water in blocks.

I hoped to learn what the heat exchanger was made from - expect chlorinated water is fairly hostile to most exchanger materials. Anyone know the answer to that? Stainless and periodic replacement?

As someone who knows nothing about the area, why good grief? What's wrong with oil? And what does "in blocks" mean?

And as for your question, I'm curious to compare -- what material is a standard pool heater made of, the part that contacts the water? And wouldn't this system probably use the same material?

The easy way to liquid cool things is to replace the heatsinks with blocks of plastic+metal and pump water through those. The plastic/metal things are blocky in appearance so get called 'waterblocks'.

That works because the hot bits of computers are fairly localised (GPU, GPU, maybe power delivery chips on the board) and the rest does fine with a little air movement.

Flooding the board with oil means replacing components is messy and, at least historically, the oil slowly seeps into capacitors and kills them. So you're likely to cover the board in a thicker conformal coating / protective layer first which is also a pain.

It's also not that effective, unless you have heatsinks on the hot parts anyway and try to force oil through them, maybe using pumps aimed vaguely at the heatsinks.

I don't know the answer to the heater question. That's further from my old hobby.

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