queezyweezel: That's great in the winter, but what about come August when it's 110F outside? That 5KW server in your basement won't be such a welcome addition then....

Unless you are married to my wife who is always cold even when it is 100F outside.

The power goes off whenever I turn the microwave on at the same time as the dishwasher. Server farms have no business in residential homes. Never mind the potential security problems with giving random people physical access to your very expensive servers running potentially sensitive information.

And heating is cheaper than cooling. Unless you live in Alaska - when summer time comes around - you aren't going to want those servers.

I just fire up Skyrim for an hour or so on max settings. Gets my computer room nice and warm.

AdolfOliverPanties: Does that require any special soil or feed to get the little servers to sprout? How long until they are mature enough to sell?

Old enough to boot, old enough to root...

/I'll save ya'll the trouble of posting and just run off and kill myself right now...

Individual heating units for each house is probably the most inefficient way to do it. I wouldn't mind buying into a subdivision that had heat fed from a central boiler. (Or in this case a data center). It's how most universities do it.

Even more frustrating is when apartment buildings have individual AC units. Put a big one on the top, meter how much Freon goes to each apartment, bill accordingly (or just roll it into "utilities included")

But this is all socialist and sharing.

Using this to heat your house would be great, but I would think the savings would be offset by cooling the house in the summer.

stuhayes2010: Using this to heat your house would be great, but I would think the savings would be offset by cooling the house in the summer.

This. And what would your liability be for failing to adequately cool them? And what if the power goes out at your residential location? Will you be required to have a back-up generator? For the average person in a typical residence, this would probably not be a cost saving measure... but I could see it being used by a larger facility in such a manner and it coming out a wash.

Pincy: queezyweezel: That's great in the winter, but what about come August when it's 110F outside? That 5KW server in your basement won't be such a welcome addition then....

Unless you are married to my wife who is always cold even when it is 100F outside.

True, my wife would take up sleeping in the warmest room in the house if she could

What if I had a 'baseboard data center'? It would just sit there and produce the same amount of heat with the same amount of electricity. But it would also do computing, such as decoding DNA, analyzing protein structures or finding a cure for cancer." gay-midget-donkey-porn

I want my sites to get traffic dammit!

queezyweezel: That's great in the winter, but what about come August when it's 110F outside? That 5KW server in your basement won't be such a welcome addition then....

Pfft, just reverse the polarity. Now the heat is used to uncalculate data, which draws in heat, producing a cooling effect. It's just gotta work!!

// like underinflating a balloon!

"Honey, could you fold some proteins, it's getting cold in here."

FTA: "Computers can be placed directly into buildings to provide low latency cloud computing"

Don't we call that a network? WTF is the point of having a cloud if it's in your building?

what about using the waste server heat to drive a steam turbine?

it's not exactly a closed loop, but you could reclaim some of the energy lost cooling the servers

midigod: FTA: "Computers can be placed directly into buildings to provide low latency cloud computing"

Don't we call that a network? WTF is the point of having a cloud if it's in your building?

perhaps it's a small server cluster that handles smaller low priority requests before handing things over the the bigger cloud cluster

Fark_Guy_Rob: The power goes off whenever I turn the microwave on at the same time as the dishwasher. Server farms have whoever did my wiring has no business in residential homes.

FTFY

Never mind the potential security problems with giving random people physical access to your very expensive servers running potentially sensitive information.

a rack of generic servers really isn't that expensive, and it's not like you have to advertise this service on craigslist. You can have a vetting and certification process, start with your own employees for example. Obviously SOME information would be too sensitive for such an approach, but not all...

And heating is cheaper than cooling. Unless you live in Alaska - when summer time comes around - you aren't going to want those servers.

The heating NOT cheaper than cooling line is far south of Alaska. Hell, I'm in upstate NY, have a very efficient furnace, a not so efficient AC, and like it cold, and I still pay far more for heating than AC. Not surprising considering the heat is on 7.5 to 8 months a year and the AC is on the other 4 to 4.5 months.

There's a lot of seasonal demand for computing services (like right now for example) that would benefit from this, so it's not like those machines would HAVE to run in July and August. Of course when they are wiring up the rack they could also wire in a cooling unit to your 220v.

DarnoKonrad: "Honey, could you fold some proteins, it's getting cold in here."

"Already working on it!" fap fap fap

darkscout: Individual heating units for each house is probably the most inefficient way to do it. I wouldn't mind buying into a subdivision that had heat fed from a central boiler. (Or in this case a data center). It's how most universities do it.

Even more frustrating is when apartment buildings have individual AC units. Put a big one on the top, meter how much Freon goes to each apartment, bill accordingly (or just roll it into "utilities included")

But this is all socialist and sharing.

You kind of ruin the socialism of it with that free market meter thingamajig. But aside from that central apartment compressor is a bad idea. You want to pipe cold and hot refrigerant lines plus drains to an evaporator that will be housed inside each apartment? And you want a solenoid to shut off the refrigerant based on local demand. So were going to run soft copper throughout a very large building, have to insulate it and provide physical protection and work space, have drains available at each evaporator or furnace (which typically aren't going to be ready for this sort of system), need a thermostat to control a solenoid at each apartment, need to run wiring to this solenoid, and then we also want to measure the flow of "freon" to estimate electricity usage to create that flow, and then we need a system to tabulate that information and do some billing?

"Because socialism" is the only good reason there could be for a central cooling plant of this nature. Notice the rest of the planet is trying to get away from even central electricity generation?

Server Farm Guinea Pig: "Hey, great, I can heat my house with that spiffy computing cluster!"

Two weeks later, the cops are busting down SFGP's door looking for a grow op because the power company ratted him out for using too much electricity.

midigod: FTA: "Computers can be placed directly into buildings to provide low latency cloud computing"

Don't we call that a network? WTF is the point of having a cloud if it's in your building?

The technical term is when it's in your building is Fog...

It costs me a lot more to run my AC (electric and old) than my furnace (gas, new). And I live in Wisconsin.

Big_Fat_Liar: But aside from that central apartment compressor is a bad idea. You want to pipe cold and hot refrigerant lines plus drains to an evaporator that will be housed inside each apartment? And you want a solenoid to shut off the refrigerant based on local demand. So were going to run soft copper throughout a very large building, have to insulate it and provide physical protection and work space, have drains available at each evaporator or furnace (which typically aren't going to be ready for this sort of system), need a thermostat to control a solenoid at each apartment, need to run wiring to this solenoid, and then we also want to measure the flow of "freon" to estimate electricity usage to create that flow, and then we need a system to tabulate that information and do some billing?

Somehow every building at school (middle, elementary, highschool and college) and every office building I've been in has figured it out. Heck we have a huge (100y x 300y) cube zoo and it's divided up into 8 or so section, each with their own thermostat. Same goes for hospitals. They'll have a few huge things put on the roof (or next to the building depending on how much the area floods).

HVAC is an entire specialty in Mechanical Engineering. You could easily do an analysis of "Thermostat is set at X, outside temperature is Y" and calculate the amount of energy required to keep it at that temp and split up pricing that way.

Either way it's a hell of a lot more efficient that having a baseboard heater and tiny window AC unit that plug into a funky outlet (I think it was a high amp 110V). And when the seasons change you just change what is plugged in.

The city of Toronto is using deep lake cooling. Link (new window) in one of their buildings.

Metro Hall, a 27 storey office building in Toronto, went online with Enwave's Deep Lake Water Cooling system in June 2006. Energy consumption at Metro Hall will be reduced by 3 million kilowatt-hours per year and reduce CO2 emissions by 732 tonnes annually

I'm sure if a group got together and said "Lets cool this entire new subdivision this way" and ran cooling lines along with water, sewage, etc. And made it either part of the subdivision fees.

Iceland does this for heating:
The Nesjavellir Power Plant supplies 840 l/sec of 83°C water (181,4 F). The water travels through 27 km long pipeline (16.78 miles) to the city with a heat loss of only 2°C on the way. The water corresponds to the heating demands for about 40,000 inhabitants, roughly ¼ of the need in Reykjavik and closest towns.

In Iceland, there are three major geothermal power plants which produce about 17% (2004) of the country's electricity. In addition, geothermal heating meets the heating and hot water requirements for around 87% of the nations' housing.

I would have absolutely no problem getting 100% of my heat from a Nuke plant 'excess'. If they can pump it 20 miles. Nuke heat in the winter and deep water cooling in the summer. But this needs scale to be viable. It'd never work if just one person wanted to do it.

Sever farm? A single Athlon XP is all it takes to heat my 50,000 square foot mansion.

darkscout: Somehow every building at school (middle, elementary, highschool and college) and every office building I've been in has figured it out. Heck we have a huge (100y x 300y) cube zoo and it's divided up into 8 or so section, each with their own thermostat. Same goes for hospitals. They'll have a few huge things put on the roof (or next to the building depending on how much the area floods).

The issue is when you do it on the cheap (or do it wrong) central heating/cooling sucks. We have some godawful setup where one of the thermostats for our office area is on another floor and things like that. This place has become littered with space heaters and fans.

I'd have a hard time buying into a centrally controlled HVAC network because I'd have a hard time thinking the builder didn't fark it all up (or get cheap on us).

/I completely agree with your comments regarding the efficiency

This isn't all that new of a concept. A couple years back, I came up with a pretty tricky system that redistributed the 'waste' heat from our facility's servers in to our office's main heating system during the winter. During the summer, the heat was dumped directly outside, while make-up air was brought in from the conditioned areas of the building. This allowed for us to shut off our regular furnaces at nights during the winter, and most days during the spring and fall. It also allowed for us to remove a dedicated 24/7 A/C unit we had for the server room.

I guess that's why the EPA also gave me a national small business award for the design - but whatev's. Link (new window)

darkscout: Big_Fat_Liar: But aside from that central apartment compressor is a bad idea. You want to pipe cold and hot refrigerant lines plus drains to an evaporator that will be housed inside each apartment? And you want a solenoid to shut off the refrigerant based on local demand. So were going to run soft copper throughout a very large building, have to insulate it and provide physical protection and work space, have drains available at each evaporator or furnace (which typically aren't going to be ready for this sort of system), need a thermostat to control a solenoid at each apartment, need to run wiring to this solenoid, and then we also want to measure the flow of "freon" to estimate electricity usage to create that flow, and then we need a system to tabulate that information and do some billing?

Somehow every building at school (middle, elementary, highschool and college) and every office building I've been in has figured it out. Heck we have a huge (100y x 300y) cube zoo and it's divided up into 8 or so section, each with their own thermostat. Same goes for hospitals. They'll have a few huge things put on the roof (or next to the building depending on how much the area floods).

Those huge things on the roof are chillers, and they cool a medium (usually water) which is then circulated through heat exchangers (the fan units in your office) throughout a building. Units with localized thermostats either control the temperature with fan speed (cheap) or by regulating the amount of coolant flowing through the exchangers (more expensive). This is pretty old technology, but it works just fine. Every apartment I ever lived in had centralized cooling/heating and if it got too hot or too cold, you just shut the fan off.

I'm not sure what darkscout is envisioning. It sounds like he's talking about distributing the whole compressor mechanism across multiple units, which doesn't make any sense to me. Just cool/heat your medium centrally and pipe it to wherever you want.

ha-ha-guy: The issue is when you do it on the cheap (or do it wrong) central heating/cooling sucks. We have some godawful setup where one of the thermostats for our office area is on another floor and things like that. This place has become littered with space heaters and fans.

I'd have a hard time buying into a centrally controlled HVAC network because I'd have a hard time thinking the builder didn't fark it all up (or get cheap on us).

I used to work for a company that solely worked on retrofitting HVAC systems for older buildings (at the power company's insistence) to save energy. This was 1991-1998, and the bulk of the problems we ran into were companies that had moved to the "digital age" by buying everyone a computer and not realizing they had essentially stuck a space heater under everyone's desk. Time and time again we ended up changing what was a good design when the building was built.

Most older buildings, particularly in industrial areas, had a standard warehouse design where all of the heating/cooling was delivered to the periphery of the building, which made perfect sense if you're assuming that the bulk of your heat transfer is going to occur near the outer walls. What we found repeatedly was that these systems were woefully inadequate once you introduced a massive "heat island" in the middle of an office. If you kept the office cool enough so people wouldn't pass out in the summer, the outer walls were too cold, the interiors were too hot, and everyone was miserable. Couple that with an inexplicable tendency for offices in the DC area to add interior walls without even consulting a mechanical engineering firm and quite a few of them were outside OSHA regulations by the time we showed up.

The worst office we ever visited was in an older building in Georgetown, and office space on the outer walls averaged 63 degrees in August while the center of the floor never got below 83. Where did they put their server room? Smack dab in the middle of a closet in the middle of the floor without any ventilation or A/C units at all.

Usually we could retrofit an office on the cheap simply by adding some duct work and improving air flow, but we did work on a few buildings that simply didn't have enough cooling power because they were designed long before anyone had thought to calculate an extra 400W per desk of heat that the computers were generating.

Lsherm: Every apartment I ever lived in had centralized cooling/heating and if it got too hot or too cold, you just shut the fan off.

I have the exact opposite experience. Every single apartment complex around here has an AC unit for each unit and baseboard heaters. In the bigger apartments every single apartment has its own micro HVAC system. If the apartment building has 20 different units you'll see 20 different condenser units outside of the building.

Lsherm: I'm not sure what darkscout is envisioning. It sounds like he's talking about distributing the whole compressor mechanism across multiple units, which doesn't make any sense to me. Just cool/heat your medium centrally and pipe it to wherever you want.

What? When did I ever say that? I was just suggesting each unit have their own evaporators. (Or in the case of chilled water, which would probably be much better than a bunch of freon fans. Basically exactly what you described.

MrSteve007: A couple years back, I came up with a pretty tricky system that redistributed the 'waste' heat from our facility's servers in to our office's main heating system during the winter.

That's pretty cool. My current company just built a new data center in their central mailing facility and since it's right under the loading dock they pump waste heat from the data center to the loading dock during the winter. Of course, during the summer they just expel it on the roof.

I've always wondered how difficult it would be to use the waste heat as a hot water heater, but apparently that wasn't something they wanted to look into.

darkscout: I have the exact opposite experience. Every single apartment complex around here has an AC unit for each unit and baseboard heaters. In the bigger apartments every single apartment has its own micro HVAC system. If the apartment building has 20 different units you'll see 20 different condenser units outside of the building.

That's how they did it when I lived in Asia - every apartment has their own window unit. It even influences the architecture on apartment buildings, since concrete ledges are built outside each window for an A/C unit, which you can see in this photo:



darkscout: What? When did I ever say that? I was just suggesting each unit have their own evaporators.

So, centrally compress the cooling medium and have each unit with a separate evaporator? It sounds like a pain in the ass.

Lsherm: I've always wondered how difficult it would be to use the waste heat as a hot water heater, but apparently that wasn't something they wanted to look into.

You could always install a heat-pump water heater (new window)in the room. Or if you're worried about that whole plumbing near servers = bad, the 2nd gen of HP-water heaters are supposed to have dedicated intake and exhaust ducts, so you can move the air around to where you need it. There are of course similar, dedicated solutions for larger scale installs, but that's a pretty simple 'off-the-shelf' solution.

/I love my HP-water heater
//600 vs. 4,700 watts, and the same amount of hot water.

Lsherm: So, centrally compress the cooling medium and have each unit with a separate evaporator? It sounds like a pain in the ass.

That sounds similar to what we do in some hotel projects. Mitsubishi's City-Multi system. Link (new window) It's nice because in building where heating and cooling are simultaneously called for, it'll redistribute the heat internally without going to the outdoor compressors. It saves a lot of room, as no ducting is required for heating/AC

Lsherm: So, centrally compress the cooling medium and have each unit with a separate evaporator? It sounds like a pain in the ass.

And much more efficient. Or like you said chillers and circulate water.

"Artists rendering" What, what are they rendering?

"a irresistible" doesn't this hurt when you say it to yourself?

Heh. This time of year, I have to crank my dorm room window, and stick a 20" box fan in just to get back to normal room temperature.

/September sucked. It was 97F in my dorm room.
//Also, the bit where every bit of air in the room is sucked through my case ~once every 3 minutes means it's coated in dust.

video man: "It's getting a bit chilly in here, lemme overclock my processor a bit."

Seriously, this is the best time of year to run Boinc/F@H projects. It heats your home, and helps SCIENCE.

/Why do you hate SCIENCE!?

Maybe what BOINC needs is to be able to use CPU frequency scaling in combination with the PC's sensors so that it can do just the right amount of work to maintain a particular case temperature.

Hmm...that might be a fun project.

So if the servers in the basement are for local cloud computing and they heat the building that would mean that when people come in to work and use the machines the building would warm up for them.

A small part of me likes that idea, it finds it comforting somehow.

Use the excess heat to warm up your marijuana grow room to tropical conditions and make even more money.

anfrind: Maybe what BOINC needs is to be able to use CPU frequency scaling in combination with the PC's sensors so that it can do just the right amount of work to maintain a particular case temperature.

Well, the Internet does suck during the summer...