Well, was mostly making a joke but would be pretty cool. I’ll bet there’s some way I could figure out how to use the waste heat to offset the water heater or something.
Hmm, liquid cooled… now you have me thinking :).
Comment on What Happens When Facebook Heats Your Home
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 11 months agoIf you live in an environment that gets hot in the summer time you may think about getting a heat pump for your home. That much heat energy being generated in the summer would be great for your energy bill. Instead of battling the heat generated by your lab with AC it would actually be used to create a more efficient heat energy exchange for the pump.
4grams@awful.systems 11 months ago
Bob_Robertson_IX@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Can you elaborate on how creating heat in summer time helps save money on cooling your home?
Kethal@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Heat pumps are great, but what this guy is saying is wrong. Generating heat when you’re trying to cool won’t help save any money no matter the technology.
Let’s say you were deliberately trying to heat something and cool something else, like a water heater and your home. Then heat pumps are doubly effective. Maybe that’s where the confusion in this comment stems from, but that’s not what’s going on with a data center.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 11 months ago
I should have been more specific, the savings would be from compartmentalizing the hot room from the rest of the HVAC system.
If you partition the lab from the rest of the hvac system and install a heat pump for the lab, it would drastically reduce the amount of heated air the HVAC system has to cool and move around the rest of the home.
Kethal@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I suspect the reasoning here is going to not be obvious so some people so I’ll add a little. Heat pumps are more efficient when there’s a larger difference between where they’re getting heat and where they’re putting it. I’m going to call this difference a gradient, because otherwise later I’ll be saying “differences of differences” which gets confusing. The argument here is that moving heat from compartmentalized 90 degrees server room to outside at 95 degrees with a separate system for the house, moving from 75 degrees to 95 degrees, would be more efficient than a single heat pump moving air from the mixed rooms at 80 degrees to 95 outside.
The magnitude of that effect would depend on how nonlinear the relationship between efficiency and the gradient is. I’m not very familiar with that. I assume it’s nonlinear, but whether it’s highly nonlinear from a gradient of 5 to a gradient of 20. From here, it’s quite nonlinear from a gradient of 25 to 40, but from 5 to 20 it’s pretty linear: www.ecosia.org/images?q=heat pump effeciecy vs te…
This also doesn’t consider that these are operated with thermostats. Presumably someone is going to set all of the thermostats to the same temperature, 75 degrees or whatever the preference is. The gradient at which the pumps start will be the same in all cases, and the difference will be in how often the pumps run. There will differences in the average efficiency because of the time difference, but it’s by no means obvious to me that there would be a significant benefit for a typical home. I would want some clear evidence before spending money on this.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
So you’re saying to just let the servers get as hot as they want and ignore it? What is this heat pump going to be heating?
If you don’t have anything you are wanting to heat up, adding a heat pump doesn’t help.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Instead of the HVAC system cooling already warm air made from the servers, you would partition the lab from the rest of the house and HVAC system, and then install a heat pump for just the room.
The heat exchange would take care of the lab, and the HVAC system would have to circulate less hot air through the system.