Hey ya,
Thought this might be of interest.
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Is this the same company that was trying to run a server from peoples house and attached to their water tanks or am I thinking of something else?
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same idea, different company
(if one was thinking of the British Gas subsidiary as per This company will pay for your heating - if you let it install a server in your house | TechRadar )
When I had a pool I always wondered why my AC couldn’t dump the heat into it
Interesting. I know of a few swimming pools that are heated by the waste heat of power stations, but this of course also makes sense. I wonder how they regulate the heat though, or if they even need to.
They could just run the servers “full power” all the time, and regulate the temperature with the remaining gas heater(assuming the server thermal output is always lower than the required heating capacity).
Depending on how the work load is distributed it might even be possible to just run fewer compute jobs to regulate the temperature “digitally”(lol).
I’ve also wondered about the reverse: Using large pools of warm water as batteries, by exploiting the thermal difference between the water and environment. Seems to me that if you have the space, you could build a very large capacity battery for not much - Just get a large underground pool, heat when you’ve got spare energy, drive heat engine when you need energy. Is this done somewhere?
Now, you could combine the two, a large body of water heated by servers, that can be used to “generate” energy on demand - Only problem is that when the battery is full, your servers are hot.
But otherwise your battery is charged by the waste heat of servers “for free”.
The electricity bill can be (partially) recuperated from the generated electricity and selling server access.
I imagine this would be somewhat similar to geo-thermal energy, except that you can put energy back in.
Could be a cool project!
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For energy storage, the delta on water is not very large.
They seem to use much hotter materials, like Milton Salt, with much, much wider differences available, though less useful for swimming pools, or cooling computers…
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There actually is an experimental solar station in Spain that uses salt to store energy during night, heated by an array of mirrors by the Sun. I’m sure there’s a YT video somewhere, but can’t find it.
As for heating swimming pools with waste heat from servers, Linus (yeah, that Canadian one) is doing just that. Or at least, plans to do it, he has had some setbacks with his contractors AFAIK so it’s not functional yet.
That might be another, but I’m not 100%.
That’s an interesting read, thanks for sharing Troop 
i watched that with partial interest, I wonder what you think, but I would have thought there wasn’t much in the way of heat coming off his home server + workstations? I do confess I know little about his home setup.
If I had a fish tank @positroned , I’d have a go for fun 
Lots of large commercial air conditioners are designed to chill a reservoir of water into ice during the night and melt it during the day to reduce cooling costs.
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It’s not just his gaming PC, his wife has hers inside the rack too. Plus various additional stuff like UPS-es and switches. His rack is actually fairly well filled. Can’t recall if the PC’s for his kids LAN-centre and the home theatre are also in the rack or separate machines. Both are in the basement, where the rack is, so distances wouldn’t be too great. (he uses optical HDMI cables for his and hers main PC’s)
Linus’ setup is indeed a bit unconventional 
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Hehe, yeah unconventional is sort of his middle name
It’s only a guess, but even with 1 server and workstation per grown up and then the kids stuff, can’t be more than 1-2KW of heat I would have thought? I’d be keen to seen the impact that would make on his pool. Might work with a large jacuzzi I guess, but a large pool I would be curious? He probably has air-con so may be that could help quite a bit, but then he might only use that when it’s warm outside and a warm pool might not be desirable. I do like to watch his antics
I don’t think the intention was to heat up the pool, but rather use the pool as a massive heat sink that will never saturate under the rack’s load. Essentially unlimited cool liquid to cool his rack.
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Dr. Cutress’ Video on the Topic.
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Very cool, good timing too.
I wonder why I didn’t get that video in my YouTube notification/subscriptions…
How is YouTube such a bad platform?!?!?!
Anyway, I(unlike Dr. Cutress) still think it could make sense.
Damn you, I was about to link Mr Potato’s video… 
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It’ Dr Mr Potato…
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I’ll settle for Mr Potato MD…
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Doctor Cutress to the emergency room, the patient is bleeding edge, and has a high CPU clock. We’ll need to operate.
LMAO
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I used to work with a nightclub in Leicester (UK). They had plumbed the cooling for their lasers into the water tanks that fed the ladies loos. On a busy night it was not a problem, but if it was slow the flush would be warm, wafting unmentionable smells into the cubicle.
The nightclub was called Mosquito Coast, not called that now. That was over 20 years ago.
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