Cloud upstart offers free heat if you host its edge servers

A UK cloud startup is offering to install its edge server hardware physically within organizations to provide free heat, in exchange for reducing its own location and cooling costs. deep green in solution Literally an IT solution ... Deep Green's server gear in cooling fluid But don't expect you can use the scheme to get …

[chivo243]

DC or DC?

DataCenter or DomainController? Glad the column says it's a DataCenter... Not sure how much heat a DC would generate, my experience says your desktop running Doom will generate more heat than a DC handing out addresses and resolving a few names.

[aerogems]

Re: DC or DC?

If it ain't direct current or district of columbia, it's not DC!

[elsergiovolador]

Re: DC or DC?

You could probably run a DNS server on a potato.

and it wouldn't be a hot potato, oh no.

[phuzz]

Re: DC or DC?

I'm pretty sure it will be using Direct Current, (at least in the server itself). Also their Data Controller will be carefully examining putting servers with customer data in unsecured locations.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

But how is this going to work in the heat of summer, when the outside air temperature is 35°C and the swimming pool doesn't need heating? Where does the waste heat go then?

[doublelayer]

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

35° is not that common for the UK, and water takes a very long time to get heated. Even in the summer, there is usually some energy spent on heating water. The situation you describe will happen at some point, but it's not going to be every year. If they try to expand these into countries that experience real heat, they'll encounter it a lot more often, which might explain why northern Europe hosts all the examples mentioned in the article.

[aerogems]

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

Hot tub (time machine)?

[gerryg]

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

Even if the system only works part of the year it seems as if energy usage will be reduced. Not sure what your point was.

At least one crematorium has used a similar system for about a decade

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-23104502.amp

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

My point was that if you put something that generates a lot of heat in a setting where the heat can only be extracted for part of the year, then you need to also either have all the infrastructure to remove the heat for the 1-2 weeks of the year when it can't be extracted that way, or turn off your data centre in a heat wave (hint: nobody is going to accept that level of uptime in their SLA).

The whole idea here, as stated in the article, is that the company saves money by explicitly not building that infrastructure to transfer heat away, and it is going to "industrial use" instead, and the only practical example in use is of a swimming pool.

Heat waves are getting more common (not less). Last year, for example, temperature records were broken (again) in the UK for the highest temperature, and it was way above 35°C. In an extreme heat wave, either that swimming pool is going to be getting heated to bath-tub temperatures (it has to be above ambient temperature to work) or they are going to have to use expensive air conditioning to extract the heat and vent it. Just at a time when swimming pools are going to be in real demand.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

I shouldn't have to point you to the second law of thermodynamics, but the temperature differences with a crematorium heating domestic hot water from cold (the best part of 1000°C) and a bunch of computer hardware heating a swimming pool (tens of degrees) mean that they are vastly different in their efficiency. Heat transfer efficiency is directly related to the temperature difference.

Typically, you will want to heat domestic hot water to something like 60°C, and the waste heat from a crematorium can do this reasonably efficiently. With a swimming pool, you want to maintain the temperature of the water at a much lower temperature (and keep the servers at something like 60°C). As that water gets hotter, you have to pump it through the cooling circuit that much quicker, and get rid of that heat faster, in order to cool the source. Water has a pretty hefty heat capacity, which is why this works when your temperature difference is around 50°C, but if the ambient temperature gets close to the target temperature, that efficiency drops. The problem arises when you want your water temperature to be below ambient temperature. A heated pool is good heated to above ambient temperature in winter, but in summer, if the ambient temperature rises above the temperature you want to keep the pool at, then you either need to extract that heat somewhere else, or continue dumping it into the pool, and see the temperature rise above the desired range. Nobody wants to swim in 35+°C water in the middle of a heatwave.

[Richard 12]

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

That's why a swimming pool is the best - and possibly only - place for this.

Water has a really high heat capacity, and swimmers like warm water - 24-30C. Evaporation from the surface cools the pool, so warmer air temp isn't as much help as you might think.

A pool needs something like 1kW per m3.

So a pool the size of Sunak's is about 600kW of heating demand. Maybe half that on a hot day.

When the processing output is low, the "traditional" heating system takes the full load. When it is high, the traditional heating is turned down a bit.

Billing is probably the main reason for business-use-only. You definitely want the servers on their own metered supply.

Though I would be a little concerned about lifetime of the kit. Chlorinated water is exceedingly corrosive, separation needs to be perfect.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Sounds great when I look outside and it's hailing

Evaporation from the surface cools the pool, so warmer air temp isn't as much help as you might think.

Yes, evaporation removes energy from the water; the other part, condensation, delivers it back to the environment. Now, arguably, a swimming pool operator could vent the water vapour out of the building rather than capture all that heat back, but the result is likely to be that the air temperature and inside of the building around a pool quickly reaches equilibrium. You might notice, as well, that the average pool environment is pretty humid and doesn't have a lot of airflow, because pools are typically designed to keep the heat in, not vent it.

Yes, swimmers like water at 24-30°C. Last year, summer temperatures got above 40°C for the first time. Prolonged periods like that, which are becoming more common, where the ambient temperature is above 30°C, and the pool becomes uncomfortably warm even with the heating turned off. Evaporative cooling from the surface of a large body of relatively deep water isn't going to cut it unless you build a cooling tower over it.

[alain williams]

Great in winter ...

but would you still want all that heat in a Summer heat wave ?

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Great in winter ...

Presumably we'll have to fill the other six swimming pools with loads of phase-change heat storage, so we can cope with the summer excess heat and hold onto it until winter.

All we need to do is work out exactly how big they need to be. My money is on "pretty fucking big," unless there's some super-duper phase-change materials coming down the line with a massive heat of fusion and room temperature melting point.

[Richard 12]

Re: Great in winter ...

Water is a seriously effective heat storage medium.

The main reason for the specialist phase-change stuff is that heat of fusion can be extracted without a change in temperature, and water inconsiderately changes phase at 273K, instead of a more useful 300 or 330K.

[aerogems]

This sort of reminds me of something my father literally won an award for and was asked to give a presentation on. While working at a meat processing plant in a climate that gets rather nipply in the winter, he suggested that instead of spending huge amounts of money on ammonia to cool a room, they just open the door in the ceiling and let the cold air from outside come wafting in. One of those ideas that no one thinks of for years, but seems so blindingly obvious once it's pointed out. It wouldn't work in every location, but it apparently ended up saving the company, with similar plants all over the country, quite a bit of money every year.

[ChrisC]

On the HVAC controllers I worked on back in the late 90's, this was referred to as the "free cooling" mode, for obvious reasons...

[MacGuru42]

heat a pool you say

if only Rish! was a real tech bro.. could have saved on his paddling pool.

[Corvic]

Get others involved in the initiative

Maybe Elon musk could talk into a funnel to generate enough hot air to turn the pool into a hot tub ?

[IGotOut]

Re: Get others involved in the initiative

I believe we no longer boil people to death as a form of execution.

[Roland6]

MS ahead of the curve with on-prem Azure servers?

So there are benefits to on-prem, just need to get those heat exchangers correctly set up.

[ITMA]

Nothing new

Not exactly a new idea.

From 2015:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-32739497

"The server that could heat your home at no cost

A radiator fitted with a computer server could help provide free heating for homes.

The heat generated by servers has been exploited on an industrial scale to warm buildings, but this is the first time somebody else's server has been used to heat a home.

'The eRadiators are not being used for permanent storage,' said Boaz Leupe the CEO of Nerdalize, 'They are really meant for firms, or universities, or research institutes that have a need for computation power.'

Mr Leupe said the amount of electricity the Eneco eRadiators used was monitored and the home owners reimbursed for the running costs."

[IGotOut]

Re: Nothing new

Click 99% of articles in the Reg and guess what. No new ideas.

[diodesign]

Nothing new?

If someone tries an idea in the past and it didn't work out, and someone else comes through with a similar idea and tries it again, that's still potentially worth noting.

How about this, I'm planning on building a faster-than-light drive. We'll be able to get to nearby stars in minutes, that's the dream. There, now that idea is out there, never again can anyone write about FTL drives or slower-than-FTL flight. The idea is old.

Also, I'm planning on making 100PB hard drives. All the galaxy's information in your pocket. OK, now that's out there, no more stories about hard disks until we're over 100PB per drive. The idea is otherwise nothing new.

I know this is reductio ad absurdum, but c'mon. And we linked to similar heating tech in the piece.

C.

[ITMA]

Re: Nothing new?

Very true.

Let's call it a better iteration. After all, most innovations are built on a foundation of lots of other ideas and innovations.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Nothing new?

How about this, I'm planning on building a faster-than-light drive. We'll be able to get to nearby stars in minutes, that's the dream. There, now that idea is out there, never again can anyone write about FTL drives or slower-than-FTL flight. The idea is old.

Fair enough, but once it has been established that the FTL drive idea has been proven to contradict the known laws of physics, so is unworkable, and anyone selling one is obviously a con-artist, any reporter worth their salt would take this into account when reporting on the next con-man that comes along and starts trying to sell his FTL drive.

I'm not saying this is a con, of course, but I also reckon that there are some problems with it that previous entrepreneurs might have run into, such as the uneven demand for heating throughout the year. If you can match the demand for computing to the demand for heating, you're all good to go, but I somehow doubt they follow the same causation, and it may be tricky to find a demand curve that correlates.

[ITMA]

Re: Nothing new?

"but I also reckon that there are some problems with it that previous entrepreneurs might have run into, such as the uneven demand for heating throughout the year"

Which could well be the (or at least a significant) reasoin why the radiators idea failed. Great in winter, but what do you do with all that heat from the "server on your living room wall" during a hot summer?

[Potemkine!]

Re: Nothing new

2013: Installation of the first 300 QH-1 in Paris. After three years of R&D, the first computing heaters have been installed in a residence of the social landlord Régie Immobilière de la Ville de Paris (RIVP), in Paris.

2017: Styrmergy, the digital boiler

[bartsmit]

Re: Nothing new

Unfortunately they didn't manage to pull it off: https://siliconcanals.com/news/innovative-e-radiator-startup-nerdalize-files-for-bankruptcy-another-painful-end-in-dutch-startup-ecosystem/

[phuzz]

Re: Nothing new

I guess that's why elReg linked to their own article on that story. Along with a couple of other articles on the exact same idea.

Or did you skip over the sentence reading: "In fact, the concept of heating buildings and homes using servers is something we've all heard before, again and again."?

[Neil Barnes]

It strikes me that this would also be effective

with the Fernwärme district heating systems that are common in Germany (and to which our house is attached). Although the heat load is obviously less in summer than winter, the same hot water delivery provides both house heating and hot water (via a heat exchanger in the cellar) so there is a year-round requirement for heating at source.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only renewable power used

The infographic states only renewable power used. How does this work? According to https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk at the time of writing over 45% of the electricity feeding the UK grid is generated from natural gas. Will these devices be connected to some other grid?

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: Only renewable power used

I half expected the "free heat" offer to be a Trojan Horse for installing a fission reactor in the swimming pool.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/24/us_nuclear_reactor_approval/

Sorry, bud, waste removal is on you. Next time read the contract before signing.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: Only renewable power used

It doesn't work - it's marketing bol..rubbish.

There is no such thing a a green lecky only supply (from the UK grid). All it means is that your supplier only buys lecky from renewable generators - most of the time (I've yet to see any supplier discuss in realistic terms how they'll carry on supplying green lecky when there isn't any to buy.) But that doesn't actually alter anything - that "green" lecky was going to be sold anyway, so if A Ltd doesn't buy it, B Ltd would have bought it. Instead, B Ltd buys less "green" lecky and more fossil fuelled lecky. The mix of lecky into the grid, and hence to everyone regardless of who they buy it from is the same.

So let's call it what it is - greenwash.

[NXM]

Rhubarb

Another possible use: the forcing sheds of the Rhubarb Triangle. I love forced rhubarb.

They used to be heated by cheap local coal, but I think some these days run on waste heat from a nearby power station.

[Roland6]

Re: Rhubarb

Well if you have access to good compost, as well, pineapples are possible. So it would seem the best partner for a data centre is a market garden…

[yetanotheraoc]

Future On Call

I guess this location is perfect for the cloud customers who don't give a rat's ass about their data. Ring, ring. Hello? Our pool is cold! Please fix it! ... Well, there's your trouble, someone has walked off with all your heating elements.