gaming pcs are a fuck cause they never get hot enough to warm up a cold room but they definitely make a hot room even hotter
Comment on Fight me
Hello_there@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
If you want to make heat, start up a gaming PC. At least the energy will go to doing something before it gets turned to heat.
godlessworm@hexbear.net 3 weeks ago
robot_dog_with_gun@hexbear.net 3 weeks ago
mine is good for a few degrees in the winter but i’m in a small room with the door shut
Spacehooks@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
7-10 degree difference for me on cold days but thats 2 gaming PCs all day.
robot_dog_with_gun@hexbear.net 3 weeks ago
or folding@home
jcs@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t have a source handy, but someone attempted to heat their apartment with computers and ended up spending something like >$1000 in utilities that month.
Hello_there@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
Resistive heat is expensive - that's why heat pumps are so good.
In practice, they would have gotten identical results with any electric resistive heater. Fans, oil filled, ceramic, etc. all largely doesn't matter as it is Wh of electricity to Wh of heat.kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
They must have overshot, then. Computers are 100% efficient space heaters that produce math as a byproduct.
copd@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
in the uk price per kWh for electricity is over five times cost of natural gas. We all use natural gas boilers to heat water which flows through radiators to warm our rooms. Anybody who heats their house with space heaters is just throwing money away whether it’s 100% efficient or not.
You see more heatpumps these days but that’s another thing entirely
kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Heat pumps cap out at about 250% efficiency, so you’d still be spending more to run them than to burn natural gas at that ratio.
HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I legitimately had to buy a heater after I stopped regularly using my desktop because it was what was keeping my room warm.
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
At that point you might as well run Folding@home on your PC just to act as a heater. It’s literally a win-win for you and for society.
HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s always been on my mind to find something for my computer to idle on. Never heard of “Folding@home”. Thank you I’ll try it out.
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
You’re welcome! Folding@home is the big one, and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search is also pretty popular (though IMHO a waste of resources for a relatively useless result). But I just looked into this topic myself after posting that comment, and turns out there’s a huge list of such “volunteer computing” projects: en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr…
So while Folding@home is a great one and medical scientific research, you might pick something else from that list. Perhaps more than one!
Now the confession: I’m a hypocrite. I never ran any of these volunteer computing projects on my own PCs. But that’s partly because I tend to shut them off every night, so a lot of the usable time for it isn’t really usable. The other part is basically that I never bothered to do it.
But I think after this conversation reminded me of it, I might look into installing it on my PC!
yardy_sardley@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
You should check out the great internet mersenne prime search as well: mersenne.org
ChrysanthemumIndica@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
I literally did that one winter when I lived in a small studio and I had a particularly fancy salvaged HP workstation. It was great!
(Except I was missing an apparently important fan and most of my RAM went bad, 96G out of 128. Make sure your system cooling works correctly before trying this!)
moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
archiveteam is another suggestion, though more helpful to historians than health science
motor_spirit@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
running FFXI and later WoW on my first rig (many moons ago) allowed me to keep my room nice and balmy all winter, to the point where I’d leave a window open for much of the day during snow-supporting temps and it’d still be toasty