My home server was serving a dual purpose of keeping my closet full of 3d printer filament dry, but then the most recent TrueNAS Scale updates killed it by dropping my average CPU load from 10 to 4%.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Those bastards.
I saw an interesting post that said
All electronics are 100% efficient in the winter
Now that we have reverse cycle AC (heat pumps), 100% is a low bar.
I know, but I didn't wanna pollute my comment with a bunch of pedantry, despite my name. Also people living in apartments often don't have access to heat pumps.
Love my heat pump, although its not AC. In the UK if you get ground/air to water the government give you £7.5k towards it. Air to air you get nothing. I suppose it is quieter, but for the 2/3 days in summer where it goes over 30°c having AC would be nice.
Back in high school, my buddy used to VNC into his Athlon 3200+ WinXP machine from school and start SuperPi calculating a million digits. Took 40minutes and got his room proper toasty by time he got home.
My server rack (in the cold garage) is now enclosed and the air filtered and piped into my grow tent which then regulates with cold air from the garage.
my grow tent
One of these days I also need to get around to starting my grow operation myself lol
I'm just kinda hunkering down with carts and waiting for MN to get dispensaries cause I'm lazy.
I was given some white widow clones and unfortunately could only keep them outdoors most of the time. Meant some generally early harvesting. I'm ready this year lol
That's the dream right there.
I love my gaming PC and 3d printer in the winter. Keeps my room toasty without me needing to run the heat much at all.
I hate those same things in the summer when I gotta have fans or AC just so I don't melt lol
Shit with my gf and I both gaming, sometimes we have to open a window in the winter
I turn off Folding@Home in the summer. Otherwise it's on 24x7.
Wow f@h still kicking?
For everyone who isn't trying to mine crypto, yeah.
Is there any way to store surplus waste heat for redistribution months later? The only thing I can think of is just a really large, high heat capacity mass surrounded by incredible insulation material, with a heat pump system built in to it. Which would be incredibly impractical.
Look into geothermal heat pumps. During the summer they pump heat from your house underground, and during the winter they pump it back in.
But the energy doesn't really stay there. The thermal mass and temperature of the ground just means that you can always efficiently take heat from it or effectively dump heat into it. Always predictably the same efficiency.
If the heat was actually stored, the start of summer and winner the pump would be super efficient, but by the end it'd be inefficient working hard to move the heat. So it seems kinda wasteful that the energy isn't being stored, but it's actually kinda better that it isn't.
You just described a water heater.
One that would potentially store heat at super dangerous pressures of steam granted.
Just have a safety vent. But I thought they cooled off within days, not months?
I have actually gotten up to run benchmarks on my PC on particularly cold nights.
Here me out: a global computing cooperative –
Collectively owned servers and gaming PCs are run at max power wherever it's winter at the time, streaming the data to where it is needed.
So it sends data to/from a remote place? A place that's probably far away, kinda like those fluffy-looking things in the sky? May I suggest that you name your idea "cloud computing"?
There, you're out.
That's a lot of bandwidth, but it sounds like a good idea.
I mean data center excess heat is already used for district heating and that's a shared resource. Not free or communal computing resource though.
Huh, I hadn't heard about this idea and a quick search on DDG returned this link: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/08/sustainable-data-centre-heating/
Interesting!
Electricity generated heat from your servers is incredibly inefficient compared to a heat pump.
Yes, but im already using the computer for other things and it would be more inefficient to double up on heating sources. I can confirm from personal expirence a PC in a small room can sufficently act as climate control.
Conversely it's exactly as efficient as a resistive heater, which lots of people still use.
Interesting thought experiment - is a pc exactly as efficient as a resistive space heater? In a pc some tiny amount of electricity is converted to light and sound and kinetic energy instead of heat. But then again, don't those other forms of energy just eventually just turn back into heat again? Hmmm...
Yes, it all eventually becomes heat, though not all in the room. Some sound escapes, and some light goes through the window or whatever. Those losses are incredibly minor though.
What makes a big difference between a PC and something purpose built as a heater is generally how the air circulates the room. A space heater is going to project it out into the room, baseboard heaters will create a wide convection current. A PC on a desk in the corner will typically just blast hot air at one localised spot on the wall which isn't really ideal for dispersing it throughout the room.
What if I reverse the direction of my fans (in from the backside and out from the front) and point it to face the middle of the room?
I would think actually more efficient because heat is the waste product not the expected product like a stand alone heater. Unless you are specifically running your PC at max just to create heat then just using your PC as intended and gaining "free" heat is a bonus.
You will certainly lose a couple of milliwatts if you have a WiFi antenna on your PC.
The rest will be turned into heat in your room, probably.
Thank you, this thought had occurred to me recently, and I was wondering if it was accurate.
This is true, but it's shocking how few people have heat pumps, especially in colder climates.
Still, it's also far less efficient than using a gas furnace (to the point that most people would actually burn more fossil fuels per Joule of heat from a resistive heater than from just burning the gas directly in a furnace).
Of course, if you're doing something useful with that energy, using the waste heat is an extra benefit. Like using waste heat from a power plant for district heating.
No one is comparing efficiency of a PC as a heating device to a Heat Pump.
So I'm not sure why you felt the need to post this.
Not sure who's down voting you. You're right. There's Heat pumps that can move 5x more heat than the energy they use. While a PC only gives you max 1:1
I interpreted the sentiment from OP that it was just reframing the reality in either case: the server is going to run, and it's going to generate heat.
You can either frame that reality as "waste heat is being generated" or "my furnace doesn't have to work as hard"
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People used to mine Bitcointhis was. Only in winter.
For the heat and electricity, it's stunning how much compute I get from my somewhat modern gear vs. my 40U rack of 10-years ago.
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