My server is a loose motherboard with a loose PSU, thrown into the living room TV rack, which I leave open for cooling. It’s a repurposed (free) Athlon, DDR2. I only use it for smb and git backups, and project sharing between my desktop and laptop. What amazes me most is my IT coworkers don’t find that a perfectly acceptable scenario.
If you’re trying to heat your home, every electronic device becomes 100% efficient. All its “waste” heat becomes wanted heat. That it might only be 40W of heat is not the point.
Heat pumps can actually be over 100% efficient if you’re measuring it based on heat produced. Because heat pumps aren’t designed to produce heat; They’re designed to move it around via refrigerant. And if you can use 1w of energy to soak up and bring in 3w of heat, you’re now 300% efficient.
So by that metric, a server would be a “bad” heater. It would still contribute to your heating, but not as much as a heat pump would. It doesn’t mean the device is below 100% efficient, it just means the bar for “good” heaters is much higher than 100%.
Every electronic device is 100% efficient after the electricity has already been generated and delivered, sure, but a bunch of efficiency losses occurred before that. If you’re comparing methane burned on-site in a furnace to methane burned at a power plant, transmitted to the site as electricity, and then used for electric resistance heating, burning on-site is gonna be better even if the furnace loses more heat up the chimney than the power plant does.
My server is a loose motherboard with a loose PSU, thrown into the living room TV rack, which I leave open for cooling. It’s a repurposed (free) Athlon, DDR2. I only use it for smb and git backups, and project sharing between my desktop and laptop. What amazes me most is my IT coworkers don’t find that a perfectly acceptable scenario.
That free computer is going to cost you a lot on your electric bill.
Not in winter it won’t.
Even in winter, it’s terrible compared to a heat pump or (probably) directly burning gas or wood.
Not how heat works.
If you’re trying to heat your home, every electronic device becomes 100% efficient. All its “waste” heat becomes wanted heat. That it might only be 40W of heat is not the point.
Heat pumps can actually be over 100% efficient if you’re measuring it based on heat produced. Because heat pumps aren’t designed to produce heat; They’re designed to move it around via refrigerant. And if you can use 1w of energy to soak up and bring in 3w of heat, you’re now 300% efficient.
So by that metric, a server would be a “bad” heater. It would still contribute to your heating, but not as much as a heat pump would. It doesn’t mean the device is below 100% efficient, it just means the bar for “good” heaters is much higher than 100%.
Every electronic device is 100% efficient after the electricity has already been generated and delivered, sure, but a bunch of efficiency losses occurred before that. If you’re comparing methane burned on-site in a furnace to methane burned at a power plant, transmitted to the site as electricity, and then used for electric resistance heating, burning on-site is gonna be better even if the furnace loses more heat up the chimney than the power plant does.
Also, a heat pump is “300%-500% efficient” in the sense that it moves 3x-5x as much heat as it uses. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
That’s the joke. :)
Not really, electricity is pretty cheap when you live right beside the largest hydro plant in South America.