Energy Company Trials Computer Servers To Heat Homes 160
New submitter MarcAuslander sends this Associated Press report: Eneco, a Dutch-based energy company with more than 2 million customers, said Tuesday it is installing 'e-Radiators' — computer servers that generate heat while crunching numbers — in five homes across the Netherlands in a trial to see if their warmth could be a commercially viable alternative for traditional radiators. The technology is the brainchild of the Dutch startup company Nerdalize, whose founders claim to have developed the idea after huddling near a laptop to keep warm after their home's thermostat broke and jokingly suggesting buying 100 laptops. Nerdalize says its e-Radiators offer companies or research institutes a cheaper alternative to housing servers in data centers. And because Nerdalize foots the power bill for the radiators, Eneco customers get the warmth they generate for free. The companies said the environment wins, too, because energy is effectively used twice in the new system - to power the servers and to heat rooms.
Great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
...except during summer when it'll be churning out heat and you want it cool.
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...except the average daytime temps in the Netherlands in Summer often could still use some warming.
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Average summer daytime temps are 17-20C which is about what we heat to in the winter in Canada. (regulations vary from 18-21C as a minimum)
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I think they regulate the appropriate temp in rentals, where often units don't pay or have individual control.
Re:Great idea... (Score:4)
Correction: They regulate the minimum temperature for rentals. The landlord has to provide a heating system that can heat to a minimum temperature for the winter, typically 20-21 C.
I have rented several units, I've never seen a unit where there was no temperature control. One of my friends, however, liked to rent basement suites, and they often had no separate heat controls. The thermostat would be in the upstairs part of the house.
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Farther up the east coast, a lot of older rentals have radiators with a single boiler for multiple units. The landlord is required to heat for a certain part of the year (15 October to 15 April is fairly common). There may be rules for a minimum livable temperature, and at least in NYC there are plenty of examples of "slum lords" who don't maintain that.
But to support the parent post, few if any of these units have a thermostat in them. But I suppose you do have some control. You can always open/close the v
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That's fucked up!
Trust me, it's not. It was regulated because people were freezing to death due to lack of heat in their apartments. While it was a long time ago, most companies will set the temperature to the exact minimum they can get away with - if the regulations go down, so does the temperature.
Now they're considering regulating how hot it can get, especially in nursing homes, as the elderly are dying in poorly run facilities due to heat exhaustion.
Re: Great idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps he means that not having individual temperature control is fucked up?
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You do realize that by "for free" you really mean "included in your rent, which you still pay for," right?
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You do realize that by "for free" you really mean "included in your rent, which you still pay for," right?
It depends. If you could find a rental which is cheaper but you have to pay your own electric/gas for the heater, the cost could end up more expensive than the one with "for free." The landlord just help controling your spending. =))
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Probably standards on what minimum temp they heat offices/workshops to.
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Wait a second. The Canadian government regulates how warm you heat your home?
Not exactly. They regulate the *minimum* the temperature an be during the winter months for rental units. Federally, it's 18C but then individual provinces/municipalities have different temperatures. Ontario is 20C I believe and Toronto is 21C.
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Wait a second. The Canadian government regulates how warm you heat your home?
This is for landlords who have control over central HVAC systems. This is also not a federal regulation but province-level. No such regulation exists in British Columbia which sucks because I've lived in places where the landlord would regularly have the place at 8c during the winter.
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So don't run it in the summer. I'm guessing you pay for the original hardware, and they pay for the energy bill to run it--so it's a decent upfront cost, but great savings for you long-term. If they don't heavily subsidize the original purchase, you don't get any benefit or harm from owning it without using it, and they don't get any benefit or harm from you having it in your house but turned off. It doesn't need to be user serviceable so they can really go all out in trying to spillproof it. In the end
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The computing power will be needed all year round but the heat won't be - that was my point.
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In the summer, you dump the heat in a river or in the air.
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I don't see how it's _needed_. Depends on the tasks. I guess I kinda see it as rooftop solar...if it's bright and everyone has extra, cool, they can sell it back to the grid and (in a perfect world) electricity is cheaper overall. If it's cloudy, you still need the electricity, so you get it from somewhere else.
Alternately maybe they're just mining bitcoins, so crunching numbers means extra cash but it's not mission critical to everyone.
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Funny)
In summer, you only crunch negative numbers, obviously...
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Crap, what happens if we crunch imaginary numbers instead?
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Just imagine the tech support calls (Score:4, Funny)
"What do you mean, you can't come out to fix my hard drive until next week? Don't you know how cold it is outside?!?!?"
Summer? (Score:2)
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The article says nothing about what happens during the summer months. You just shut down the servers then? (HTTP 707 Error: Server on summer break).
They probably install a duct to just circulate outdoor air through the unit. In The Netherlands the average high temp doesn't get past 70F/21C so there are few times when you would have waste heat that you couldn't use.
Plus, these are no doubt highly distributed redundant systems (cloud, as it were) so turning them off and relying on servers elsewhere is a viable option.
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And, as a bonus, you can always heat water - showers are (hopefully) always in style.
Even preheating water can save a significant fraction of your power bill.
look up summertime temperatures in netherlands n/t (Score:2)
look up summertime temperatures in netherlands.
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This is Europe. No one here works in the Summer.
Worrying (Score:2)
I have had the fancy that in the future the computers with the most processing power in your home would be the devices we currently use to just generate heat. Things like hairdryers and electric ovens would be massively powerful computers full of graphical processing unit like chips. Crunching fiendishly difficult computation while performing their normal function, just generating heat is waseful.
Now it seems this random idea is coming true, I hope many of my other random ideas don't come true for the saf
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"What are you trying to do, destroy us all?!"
-- Zac Hobbes, The Quiet Earth
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You could run an additional heat pump with the cool side attached to the computer.
Risk (Score:2)
Who bears the risk of junior spilling a juice cup all over the expensive servers?
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Who bears the risk of junior spilling a juice cup all over the current heating furnace?
Obviously the server should be kept in the utility room (or basement) where junior doesn't usually play, and protected within some housing that doubles as a means of keeping the hot air collected so it can be ventilated at specific places throughout the home.
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Then it will make a pretty useless damned radiator, won't it?
If you are trying to use this thing as central heating, then I'm betting all of the possible benefits pretty much go away.
If you want central heating, use central heating. If you want a radiator in a room to give spot heating, do that.
But putting a giant toaster in your basement to then circulate the heat around? I'm pretty much certain the laws of thermodynamics would say that's a terrible way of doing it.
For central heating, the existing solut
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But putting a giant toaster in your basement to then circulate the heat around? I'm pretty much certain the laws of thermodynamics would say that's a terrible way of doing it.
No less efficient than any other central heating system.
For central heating, the existing solutions would work far better than inefficient electrical appliances generating hear.
There is no such thing as an inefficient electrical heater, unless you're venting the heat outside or something. Because all the waste energy is given off
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Free heat
It's hard to beat
Even with forced air
It works a treat
Burma Shave!
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Heat is heat, it's maybe less efficient to redistribute it throughout a house than in a single room, but a rack of servers puts out a lot of heat.
You would want a thermostat that controls an input damper and an output damper, so that when it called for heat the servers recirculated the indoor air and when it didn't, the severs drew air from outside and output it outside. An existing furnace could provide supplementary heat if the rack's heat output wasn't sufficient.
I think the bigger idea has a lot of dra
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Maybe a little rewiring and you now have that render farm you've always wanted.
Want to know what I think? (Score:2, Funny)
I think this idea sounds like a bunch of ... ... hot air.
*takes of glasses*
* YAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHH *
Data centres (Score:1)
Data centres are data centres for a reason... redundant high speed backbone connections, and redundant power supplies (with generator capacity). As well as physical security, non-destructive fire suppression, and trained on-site technicians. Heat dissipation is just the current focus because all of the other (real) problems have been addressed so well.
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Data centres are data centres for a reason... redundant high speed backbone connections, and redundant power supplies (with generator capacity). As well as physical security, non-destructive fire suppression, and trained on-site technicians.
Sounds like a lovely place to live. I'd move right in. Are there any view apartments?
NSA called (Score:2)
Mine coins! (Score:1)
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In the long run, I think this will be the only way digital currency becomes profitable.
I imagine giant server farms in Alaska, Canada, and Russia, all with liquid-cooled ASIC processors, keeping both the bitcoin network alive AND providing heat to their local communities. Win win.
Bad Idea (Score:2)
yes obviously you are right (Score:5, Informative)
clearly you are an expert in this field and have done all the necessary research to determine whether this could be pursued in a trial rollout.
unfortunately, the project is not being run by experts such as yourself, it is being run by random dudes that just troll the internet posting drivel in comment threads. they are doomed!
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so here's the cool thing about heat. creating heat is one of the few things that we can actually do with amazing efficiency, nearly 100% in fact.
so i'm not sure what you think thermodynamics has to do with this, but even a 7th grader could tell you that running a computer is actually a very effective and efficient way to generate heat from electricity.
now, when sending servers out to a bunch of different locations and keeping track of them, i would say that a logistics manager is pretty darn useful. here's
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A server needs a regulated environment not 110 degrees in the summer and -10 in the winter
I keep my furnace and hot water tank in a dedicated room like most people. There aren't ever 5 year olds and hot chocolate in it.
It also tends to be pretty constant temperature; not ranging wildly from 110 to -10 on any scale.
It needs humility and dust control.
Honestly even average smb server rooms/closets lack anything beyond rudimentary ventilation.
No competent insurer would even give insurance for commercial server in a residential house.
Yet they'll insure a $10- $20,000 worth of home theatre gear in the living room without batting an eyebrow. I'm pretty sure they won't blink at a couple feet worth of cheap dell blades in a dedi
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There are already places in the Netherlands where they have combined electricity/heat plants. The waste heat from the electricity generator is pumped around underground conduits for heating houses.
You could combine these plants with extra computer server rooms. Start with cold water, run it through the servers, send the warm water into the steam generator where it will take less energy to turn into steam. Send the hot water to the houses.
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Exactly. Putting individual servers in residential homes is a stupid plan.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is it they say about computer security? I remember - no system can be defended if the hacker has physical access. Real data centres have high security : guards, locked doors, and even inside the building the servers are within their own locked cages. Let me know me what hosting companies are proposing to house their servers in Joe Sixpack's basement, and I'll avoid.
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And despite this commonly-held belief, it took *years* for the PS3 to be cracked open, with millions of units in the field, without guards or locked doors.
Physical security is a hell of a good start toward stemming the tide, but it doesn't hold a candle to systems that are actually secure.
I used to heat a large 2-bedroom ground-floor corner apartment with waste heat from computers and audio gear. It did have baseboard heaters, which did get used once or twice on the coldest nights, but often there was a wi
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Are you going to trust (Score:2)
A company who hosts its servers in random people's houses?
While an interesting social experiment, this looks like a very self-limiting market.
Make a nice ... (Score:2)
... home computer, too.
Flashback to 2011 (Score:2)
http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Seriously guys, when Microsoft 1.) had the idea years ago, 2.) has the investment capital to give this a viable shot, and 3.) with Azure, has an immediately viable and marketable need for a set of servers that can be dynamically powered up and down...and THEY haven't gotten it to be a viable idea...I sincerely doubt that a startup in the Netherlands will have greater success.
To be fair though, one would imagine that the Netherlands is colder, for more of the year, than the m
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http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Seriously guys, when Microsoft 1.) had the idea years ago, 2.) has the investment capital to give this a viable shot, and 3.) with Azure, has an immediately viable and marketable need for a set of servers that can be dynamically powered up and down...and THEY haven't gotten it to be a viable idea...I sincerely doubt that a startup in the Netherlands will have greater success.
It's worth noting the Netherlands is going to have better broadband service to network those far-flung servers with.
The new thermostat settings (Score:5, Funny)
A dial on the side of the server ranging from:
1) Allow Single thread only
2) Allow Multiple Threads
3) Allow Multiple Cores
4) Enable GPU Access
5) Start Java processes
6) Disable port blocking
7) Run NortonAV
8) Run Chrome
9) Compile complex C++ Template-base Project
10) Enable Adobe Updater
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(12) mine coins
(Seriously, what kind of a /.er uses unbalanced parentheses for lists? Please hand in your geek card at once.)
Atonement (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, what kind of a /.er uses unbalanced parentheses for lists?
Atonement for years of unfinished LISP programs.
I already did that back in the 90s (Score:2)
It is called a Seagate 10000rpm SCSI drive.
May not completely on topic. (Score:2)
Compared to my electric radiator? (Score:2)
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This sounds beyond useless. Going by my Mac Pro tower, and my $30 electric radiator: Mac Pro, expensive, never really gets all that warm, did almost nothing to warm up my room, draws more power. Electric Oil Filled Radiator, Wicked cheap, warms my room nicely enough, draws less power them my Mac Pro.
So, care to guess where the power drawn by the Mac Pro goes to?
A tiny, really tiny, amount to a power LED and a little to a fan. The rest winds up as heat. You know, that pesky conservation of energy thingie. If the Mac Pro actually drew more power (which it certainly does not), then it would also put out more heat.
A few fairly obvious things (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Thermodynamics: if you need to convert electricity to heat for any purpose you can get computation out for free. Electricity is very low entropy, low-grade heat over a large area very high, you can have the difference as useful computation
2. The article makes clear these are compute servers, not data servers or web servers. They may well be bitcoin mining, or running large-scale compute jobs for universities or the local met office or rendering a movie or ... In any event you expect a proportion of the servers in any job to fail. When you think they may have failed you restart the tasks they were doing somewhere else. Most of these tasks do not need much security either. There is little to gain by stealing or changing the predicted air pressure in a 100x100x10km block of air over Belgium next Thursday.
3. They are surely custom servers, not standard racks -- no moving parts. SSD for boot, application data over the net and a fanless design. They can be totlally sealed units entirely immune to junior's orange juice. Use mainly nonstandard form factors and they become basically unsellable reducing the theft problem and getting round some more security issues.
3. The article says that the supplier supplies power. Whatever cable they use for that can easily have a fibre built in for data.
4. Since this is cloud compute, it doesn't matter much if it gets turned off on rare hot days in the Netherlands, but if you care, pay the owner to open a window instead.
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3. [...]no moving parts. SSD for boot,
As far as I can tell this is speculation on your part. Past a certain weight people are not going to throw the box around. As a heater it's also quite possible that it will be fastened to a wall or something too. Not that it matters anyway.
3. The article says that the supplier supplies power. Whatever cable they use for that can easily have a fibre built in for data.
That however is totally unrealistic. First they say they'll pay for power, not that they will lay their own electric cable all the way to the customer to bring power. That would be incredibly stupid, wasteful and so expensive they would never get a positive return on inve
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You are right that the no moving parts thing is speculation, but it's what I'd do. Several people have worried about disk failures and such like as a concern with the idea, and noise would also be a concern.
Regarding cabling, yes, you are right. In densely populated areas of the Netherlands there is probably fibre to the apartment building already, but they might have a low-networking workload in mind.
I think this is BS (Score:2)
At least commercially it is BS. In a modern DC, climate control takes up less than 9% of all electricity. Those meager savings can't make up for all the problems involved here (service and installation processes, safety issues, etc).
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Quick googling on a topic shows different numbers , like "most of the world’s data centers, 63 percent of the power is associated with cooling the IT equipment" , new DC designs lowers ratio of power used for cooling to about 30%, etc. Less than 9% for cooling is in Iceland DCs, right?
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Nope, Central Europe.
State of the art for a DC is a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) value of 1,1 or lower. This means: for getting 1kwh used for a computer, you have to put 1,1kwh (or less) into the datacenter.
This uses the adiabatic cooling, which is some kind of cheating (you are evaporating water). But water is in ample supply here (not being California).
We are currently in the process of designing a new DC and getting the PUE value as low as possible is major design goal.
See: http://www.modbs.co.uk/news [modbs.co.uk]
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From TFA - it's an energy company with existing customers, they are planning to use those for distributed computing projects - security uptime and connection bandwidth is not an issues. Servicing clogged fans might be a hassle. Obviously they are going to charge customers for those "e-Radiators" - so basically energy company pays for hardware in electricity.
Good idea! (Score:2)
The service already exists elsewhere (Score:3)
Qarnot Computing of France has around 300 Q-Rad servers installed in homes, offices and schools, carrying out specialised work, including risk calculations for a French bank
http://www.datacenterdynamics.... [datacenterdynamics.com]
In Germany Cloud&Heat offers a generic OpenStack service to "cloud customers", and free heat to "heat customers" who have its cabinets installed in their buildings.
http://www.datacenterdynamics.... [datacenterdynamics.com]
And in New York, Exergy is still at the Kickstarter phase, but has some interesting ideas
http://www.datacenterdynamics.... [datacenterdynamics.com] Peter Judge
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Modern nerds they need a arduino and a wiki page.
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They are computer programmers, not computer engineers.
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OMG. A wire! Run Away! Run Away!
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Purchasing power has advanced much faster than inflation. A common meme is "A suit cost $20 in 1913." But the GDP per capita in 1913 was much less. You can look it up (as I have) and you will find that as a percentage of GDP per capita, a suit today is something close to 5 times less than it was in 1913.
The money supply has increased significantly faster than inflation. The quantity theory of money is deeply flawed.
Re:End the Fed! (Score:4, Informative)
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Even so.
$20 in 1913 was worth almost $500 today [bls.gov]. But the nominal gdp per capita [measuringworth.com] in 1913 was about $400, while in 2013 it was over $50000. So: $20 / $400 gdp per capita in 1913 = 0.05 or 5% of yearly income. $400 / $50000 = 0.008, or 0.8% of yearly income. Thus, purchasing power has increased since 1913. The equivalent of $20 today will buy you much more than you could get in 1913. That includes electronics that didn't exist in 1913: radios, wind-up LED lights, cell phones, etc.
Regarding your example of a go
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Not to mention that many diseases were a death sentence in 1913. Sure, health care was cheap. The doctor would take a chicken in trade; but all he had was a black bag. Appendicitis? surgical mortality was much higher. Polio? No vaccine. That's why FDR was in a wheel chair. Today? We can even cure some cancers if we catch them in time. Yeah, paying premiums sucks. I just paid mine today. Hate it; but I have no desire to go back to 1913.
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It's not a linear conversion. Even a $5 suit in 1913 was likely to be hand-tailored simply because mass-production wasn't as far advanced back then. Electronics were esoteric high-tech devices, not something run off en-masse by extremely specialized automated machinery. Food, on the other hand, was quite labor-intensive and made up a big chunk of where most people's paychecks went. It still has a lot of labor in it (hence the exemption from minimum-wage laws for farm workers), but we've managed to come up w
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You know ... we have these neat research servers to help you with that.
Re:PS3 as prior art (Score:5, Funny)
We always knew the PS3 wasn't cool.
Signed, Nintendo and/or Microsoft fanboys.
My art is prior. (Score:4, Interesting)
My first unix box was an Altos. Don't recall exactly when I got it but it finally died in the late '80s.
The thing burned something like a kilowatt. It also had a four-inch muffin fan - blowing outward. While this sucked dust in all the openings, it was convenient for heat scavenging, AND exhaust. The latter was important in my non-air-conditioned college-town house.
I got a couple 4" drier vents, some drier vent hose, and a heat-scavenging diverter valve (which were big that year - for electric driers only!). Took the flapper valve and rain shield off one of the drier vents, yeilding a fitting that I mounted on the pancae fan's four mounting screws. It coupled the airflow nicely into the drier vent hose, which was essentially exactly the diameter of the fan blade shroud. A few 2x4s mad a wooden insert that went into the window in place of the screen unit, with the other vent in the middle of it. Hooked the two together with the hose, with the diverter in the middle of it, and the third hose segment feeding the hot air register.
In the summer the space-heater's-worth of hot air went out the window instead of into the house. In the winter the hot air fed the furnace distributon, providing a base heat supply to the house with the furnace coming on to "top it off" to the desired temperature.
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Oh crap, the value of Bitcoin is below the cost of the electricity required to mine it - we're going to freeze to death!
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Is it still worth it to mine any coins at all with a GPU?
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Oh crap, the value of Bitcoin is below the cost of the electricity required to mine it - we're going to freeze to death!
That's only if you're comparing the cost of the electricity to the value of the Bitcoins. When you add in the value of the heat you're generating for practical use it's different.
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I'm writing this from a wooden hut in rural Thailand. Place between 2 small towns, river view, 20 km to nearest 7-11, local children still amazed when they see foreigner - it's as far from civilization as it gets in Thailand. ADSL, Bandwidth Down/Up(kbps) 7168 / 506 - could be better, it's cheapest tariff, something less than $15/mo. My point is - there is no excuses for 64kbps torture anywhere in a country that invented the thing!
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If your apartment building is big enough, club together to get a leased line which you can all share... They will install dedicated lines anywhere if your willing to pay the installation costs.
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I guess more CPU intensive, less bandwidth hungry - you gonna freeze on media download and a like, very little CPU power needed to saturate fat pipe - those belongs to data-centers.