Product idea

Which begs the question, will the earnings pay the electric bill?

bob prohaska

Burning the New York Times might be worse.

A heat pump is the most productive, of the electrical heat sources. Mining crypto, dunno.

Couldn't you burn gas, boil water, spin a generator to make electricity, and heat your house with the condensate heat?

That would make free electricity.

Certainly, and it has a name. Combined cycle, or something similar. It is a simple as running a diesel generator and heating the house with it radiator, and a heat exchanger on the exhaust.

What is the design life and replacement cost? Writing off the investment over a few years could work out more expensive than the electricity it saved.

Long ago there was a residential product introduced:

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

It doesn't say what the fuel source is. Does it burn gas, or is it an electrically powered heat pump?

Our home computers are already resistive space heaters.

As is our gas cooking range. It puts heat into the house more efficiently that our gas central heater, because there's no heat being exported through an exhaust vent.

I've considered trying to recover some heat from the vent, or from the house drain water, but either would be a bunch of work.

It burned natural gas. Output is electricity exported to the grid and heated water for use in space heating or hot water. There's a video here:

bob prohaska

A few kW of computers costs much more

I remember back in the ECL mainframe days the waste heat was used to heat the computer center. When IBM announced a new series with much lower power consumption we proposed a spoof commercial with a bunch of people huddled around their new mainframe discussing doubling their compute power to get enough heat.

My research advisor was telling us when he used an IBM 650 (tube based!) in Montana they had a low heating bill in the winter, but the summer air conditioning bill was high.

The 650 had hardware floating point, including divide. With tubes. The mind boggles.

You have to ask somebody else about that. :-)

I read, maybe decades ago, that it was in fashion for businesses in Britain to do this, and they surely dir make the numbers.

The calculation was done for the heating of the building. The electricity was extra gains.

Of course when the engine drops a valve on a New Year’s Day with 20 degrees of frost, you can’t get it fixed before all your pipes freeze and flood the house.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Desktop computers that put out significant heat have gone the way of the dodo for most people under the age of 40 probably, those who aren't PC gamers, anyway.

I have a couple pieces of "big iron" that's partly because I'm just old-fashioned; I have some gear connected to the little cube PC in the lab and I like doing backups to my own home server as well as the cloud.

My laptop at idle doesn't heat a thing and at full tilt puts out enough to warm up one finger, maybe.

here the same idea is used by some big datacenters, selling the heat from the their cooling system to the district heating system

the local cement factory also adds to the district heating system

it depends, if you have excess wind energy you might as well use it for something and the distribution system is already there.

Even in corporate setting you can get things the size of a shallow lunchbox now that can do everything that any normal office worker will ever need. Many of them will clip onto the back of an LCD display.

My laptop back around Y2k was I think a Pentium 4 and left permanent scorch marks on the table where I used it. It was definitely not a laptop by any stretch of the imagination unless you wanted to be cooked!

OK I will admit that I did run it fairly hard for max performance.

I choose systems these days for maximum performance and minimum power consumption. If I am not running a heavy maths simulation and just typing like I am now then in winter I can get a "Warning CPU fan 0 rpm" message - it used to bother me at first until I checked the CPU temperature which was under 30C so totally safe.

Modern OS and modern CPUs throttle back the clock and make all the performance cores idle when there is no serious computational load.

There are thousands of district heating systems in the USA.

I spent some time in the USSR. Moscow has a public heating system, mostly unmetered. If it gets too hot in an apartment, they open the window. (They have one, if they are lucky.)

My computer room stays one or two degrees above other rooms. A desktop computer, some peripherals, printer, switch, wifi AP, a minicomputer with display...