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
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
But the heat pump doesn’t compute in parallel to heating.
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.
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.
For electric heating, you basically only have two options, heat pumps and resistive. Within just that comparison, 100% is the lower limit.
If you want to compare it to other types of heating, efficiency becomes much harder to measure, because the inputs can differ.
If you’re using electricity generated by burning fossil fuels it’s simple enough, but the “100% efficient” resistive heating loses again because you could just burn the same fossil fuels in your home to heat it directly which is much more efficient.
If you’re using renewable power, then “efficiency” kinda becomes meaningless because you’re using entirely different resources to produce the heat, so you can only try to abstract it by using either money or environmental impact per unit of heat as a stand-in. I don’t have the numbers on it right now so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think resistive heating would actually be more expensive than fossil-fuel based heating, generally speaking - there’s a reason that it’s not really a wide-spread thing for heating whole homes.
So unless I’m wrong on something here, resistive heating is really not going to be among the most efficient options, unless you specifically only look at environmental impact and are using regenerative sources for it. But even then, the heat pump just wins by miles.
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?
My gaming PC noticeably helps heat up one of the rooms in my place during Winter.
In the Summer, however, that’s a downside rather than an upside.
Well sure, if the electricity is powering something you already need and the waste heat is beneficial, then awesome, I guess that’s free heat. But it’s actually pretty rare that people need to be using that much electricity for anything as consistently as you would need for heating a home. And if you don’t actually need to be using that electricity, there’s really no way around the fact that electric heating is really pretty expensive.
I guess if you are stuck with electric heating as your only option and a heat pump is out of your price range, then mining crypto could be a nice way to offset the cost of electric heating… But then the equipment costs would add up and you’d probably be better off with a heat pump anyway.
Yes, a computer heating system would be just as efficient as an electric wall heater at near 100% effective whereas heat pumps effectively ranges from 300% to 500%: for 1w used to operate the pump you will pump 3 to 5w of heat into your home.
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
Lol, I misread that as Raspberry Pi 500, and thought to myself: it couldn’t have been that hot.
It’s all fun and games until it’s summer
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
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.
GPU server rentals (AI) “from home” have a payback of about 1 year from some utility supplies. Solar brings it down to well under 1 year, and works well with no utility export ever, and can support up to near constant 80%/amps power draw. Averaging 50 amps will look like a grow op.
A smallish 5000w server/utility room (same as electrical/battery room usually designed to be large enough for a boiler/furnace + hot water tanks, and a bit extra storage) will heat room well above 35C. A cheap(est) air source heat pump can make 85C water at 2+ COP, and normal 65C hot water at 4+ COP. Simple CPU/GPU watercooling systems that blow towards the air source heat pump can bring input air to 45C.
What “rentable home server” functions provide is allowing maximum solar to support an EV off grid, storing up hot water in fall for hydronic floor heating, and helping top it up on sunny winter days. Turning off the servers for the worst 2 solar months of the year. Using EV to reverse charge home in worst winter conditions a better option than a gasoline generator.
There are also (unfortunately tend to be expensive) stackable plastic water containers that can help create a warm water reservoir while cooling surrounding computer racks/servers and batteries if you keep them in same room. DIY bendable aluminum sheet water troughs is much cheaper and just needs a toilet mechanism to turn off refilling valve.
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
There’s a next to zero percent chance this wouldn’t run on its own network.
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
Ah, thanks
Only looked on their own site and couldn’t anything about itOk, that sounds pretty cool
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That’s interesting. I don’t really understand it too well from the compute side of things though. Sounds like that’s at the whim of whoever has their heat running. And what happens if they want to turn the heat off before the job is done?
I actually wait for winter to rip DVDs for this reason.
Now if they allowed the customer to rent these and were profit-sharing, this’d be interesting. Instead it’s one step away from a boring capitalist dystopia
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So that’s where all the rPi’s got to…
