UK Power Networks trials Thermify’s HeatHub boilers, swapping gas flames for clustered compute
Reusing heat from servers has gained momentum recent years, but UK Power Networks (UKPN) is taking an unusual approach: installing mini datacenters powered by Raspberry Pi hardware in customers homes to provide heating for families struggling with energy costs.
UKPN, which manages the “last mile” of cables and substations delivering electricity from the National Grid to customers in the South East of England, is piloting the project as part of its SHIELD (Smart Heat and Intelligent Energy in Low-income Districts) program.
This will equip participating households with solar and battery systems, while one-third will also receive the “HeatHub” system - a compact datacenter roughly the size of a large heat pump that replaces traditional gas boilers. […]
You definitely won’t regret chaining 500 Raspberry Pis together.
I’ve often thought about this, if you’re actually using the waste heat from a PC does that mean its basically 100% energy efficient?
This seems like a really cool idea, although I’m not quite sure what happens in the summer when all this compute power gets shut off
I’m not knocking this idea, but it seems like a common misconception that all heating is just waste. A heat pump, for example, gives more heat per unit of energy than just the basic one to one of resistant heating.
True but I guess the idea with this is we’re going to use servers anyway, might as well make use of the heat
It is solid logic, as long as you’re only utilizing heat that would have been produced anyway, independent of whether it’s used productively or not. It goes bad if you start justifying inefficient hardware for longer than you otherwise would have because of it.
100% efficient electric resistance heating (including computing) is somewhere around 1/5 to 1/3 as efficient as a heat pump. It’s also not necessarily better than gas heating, although that’s harder to directly compare.
Oh wow I didn’t know heatpumps were that much better
if you’re actually using the waste heat from a PC does that mean its basically 100% energy efficient?
It is exactly as efficient as an electric heater, yes, but an electric heater is one of the least efficient ways to heat a home.
Most costly*
electric heating is very efficient in the sense that it converts almost 100% of the electric energy into heat. But electricity is expensive.
I think the implied point of comparison is (edit: e.g.,) heat pumps, which are effectively more than 100% efficient (as mentioned elsewhere in the thread), making ~100% efficiency relatively inefficient by comparison.
You keep pointing this out, and it’s true that heat pumps are superior. But given the range of options for home heating I think “100%” is going to be among the most efficient.
Bitcoin bros actually did this at one point by making a space heater that was also a Bitcoin miner.
You get heat at similar energy efficiency to just running a regular space heater, but it pays back part of the energy bill with Bitcoin it mines. You could see how this could probably be adapted to other things, like what’s mentioned in the article (distributed cloud compute).
The main issue is that space heaters and other in-home heat generation units are still infinitely less efficient than things like heat pumps in many circumstances, since those can reach over 100% efficiency since they only transfer heat, rather than having to generate it from scratch.
I’m not sure I’d say infinitely less efficient. It’s a 5-6x difference, which is still very significant on the electric bill.
if you’re actually using the waste heat from a PC does that mean its basically 100% energy efficient?
Yes, but there is a big caveat: Heat pumps are much greater than 100% electrically efficient.
No, that doesn’t violate thermodynamics. We don’t count any of the thermal energy input into the “source” side of the heat pump, but it ends up on the “sink” side anyway. We are only comparing electrical input to thermal output, and the thermal output is much greater than the electrical input: Heat pumps are much more electrically efficient at heating your home than any form of resistive heating, including the waste heat from your PC.
A mining rig might be able to exceed the economic efficiency of a heatpump, but we would need much more data to attempt that calculation.
I thought the same thing, jjst in a different way:
If thr only thing electronics are 100% efficient at is producing heat, then why not think of a Raspberry Pi as a heater that just so happens to be able to do calculations as a byproduct, as opposed to heating elements which can’t?
If thr only thing electronics are 100% efficient
Heat pumps are much more than 100% electrically efficient. They are around 300% electrically efficient.
Watt for watt, a heat pump sinks a lot more heat into your house than either a resistive heating element or a raspberry pi.
its why i was jokingly saying back during covid winter, that at the time, while frowned upon, gpu mining is less wasteful than heaters. one heats a room something in return. the other intentionally wastes energy only to heat a room.
I dont need heating on weekends where i game a lot, so yeah this absolutely works. If your PC pulls 500W from the wall then its exactly like having a 500W space heater. Thats also why i play less compute intensive games during the summer or lock them to 60fps. Playing Palworld on 60 instead of 144Hz makes a roughly 100W difference for me.
They did always say the Cloud is just someone else’s computer.
The only difference is you might know the bloke. And that he might try scrapping the copper
It’s all fun and games until it’s summer
Why not any gpu mining any coin?
That’s how I heated my university dorm that only had a boiler for heating. Figured it was safer than a space heater and wouldn’t require me to haul an additional object home every summer, plus funded my lavish college diet of ramen and "how many soda refills can I get with my 99 cent McDonald’s cup’.
Built a script to monitor the rooms air temperature and throttle mining accordingly to ensure that the room stayed within a few degrees of what I wanted. Would start up automatically after a few minutes away from my machine and stop if I was using the machine.
Probably not worth it.
If you need heat, mining anything is free money.
That’s only true if we’re comparing GPU mining to resistive heating. Both are equally efficient at converting electrical energy to heat: 100%.
The numbers don’t look nearly as good when we compare GPU mining to a heat pump. Heat pumps utilize an additional, uncounted source of free energy (outdoor heat). Since we aren’t counting that additional energy, the electrical efficiency of the heat pump is much greater than 100%.
If you don’t have enough GPU power to meet your heating needs, there’s a capital cost to get more (and depending on your existing setup, likely even more capital costs for other components to be able to run it in a separate system).
Not to mention electricity
Lol, I misread that as Raspberry Pi 500, and thought to myself: it couldn’t have been that hot.
Can’t I just use one Raspberry Pi but run Java on it?
If the Pi melts, it won’t be much use for heating, now will it?
I would run folding at home or seti to warm my room back in college. It was surprisingly effective when I kept the door closed.
That said, I don’t particularly want someone else’s server equipment in my home unless I get root too.
Idk my Intel based System 76 Lemur Pro does well in the Texas winter when the grid goes down.
If the grid goes down, how do you expect to power the Intel space heater?
Its got a nice battery, but beyond that I am counting on white jesus
Nice concept, but imho also a potential security threat, letting someone run something on your computer in your network.
Would need more technical details and by now I couldn’t find it on their page
A dedicated network connection at each site in being installed, so householders don’t have to worry about HeatHub eating all their broadband bandwidth, the company told us
TLDR
There’s a next to zero percent chance this wouldn’t run on its own network.
