Tha's only one side of the equation
It's nice that UK homes help absorbing the extra heat generated, but I hear suspiciously little about what is going to happen during our already heating up summers. Somehow everyone elegantly skips that part..
UK wants more homes heated by waste heat from datacenters
The UK government says it is pumping £90 million ($119 million) into building and improving heat networks that redirect excess heat energy generated by a datacenter or factory and use it to warm homes or for other purposes. According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), more than 750,000 homes will get …
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Friday 25th September 2026 09:37 GMT Pete Sdev
Re: Tha's only one side of the equation
Use the heat from DCs to produce electricity which is then used to power domestic heat-pumps running in reverse. ^^
What's also omitted is the low quality and insulation of much of the UK's housing stock. District heating (which as the article rightly points out has been done in other countries for decades) is a good idea, but if most of the heat leaks out though draughts and so, it's not half so effective as it should be.
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Friday 25th September 2026 12:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Tha's only one side of the equation
If it were viable to use that heat to generate power, I'm sure the datacentres would be doing that already. It's cheaper* to just vent the heat and buy the equivalent electricity.
(* cheaper just refers to short-term financials. The long-term environmental cost is known but will be someone else's problem)
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Friday 25th September 2026 21:41 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Tha's only one side of the equation
"If you know of a way to viably produce electricty from a heat source that is at around 95 °C, you should get down to the patent office."
It's not absolute temperature, but ∆T. In the UK, you'd have to be way up in the Orkneys on the coldest day of the year to generate much so your premise is true in practice.
I spent a nice hour at a JPL open house years ago chatting with person from Teledyne about using an RTG to make electricity on the moon. The best way we could see was a ground source heat pump to the "cold end" could be kept very cold. The question to be answered is how deep would be optimum to bury the lines. Lunar regolith is extremely hard to excavate so you'd only want to trench as deep as required. I wish they were hiring at the time as it would have been a fun job to work on problems like that and get paid for it.
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Friday 25th September 2026 12:56 GMT cyberdemon
Re: Tha's only one side of the equation
I assume Pete is being sarcastic about generating electricity from waste heat. The "hot" coolant from a datacentre is only about 60 degrees C, if that. Running the chips too hot would reduce their lifespan, which would cost the slop-sloppers billions.
Also, the datacentres wouldn't want to send their primary circuit coolant off-site as it could come back contaminated. So there would need to be additional heat-exchangers which further reduce the temperature flowing to houses, and the lower the temperature the higher the flow and bigger insulted pipes needed to make it useful.
The minimum water temperature for useful heating is 40C (a domestic gas boiler will go up to 85C), so this doesn't sound like a very sensible idea to me. I suspect the houses would need their own heat pumps to boost the temperature, as seen in "sewage source heat pumps".. an apt comparison really.
Plus as we saw this summer, UK houses are starting to need cooling as much as they need heating. Datacentres cause heat-islands that made the summer even more unbearable.
It just sounds like a fig-leaf to pretend that the a datacentre could be of some use to its neighbours, and any datacentre district heating project that does go ahead will be a total failure that makes everyone suffer.
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Saturday 26th September 2026 15:27 GMT I could be a dog really
Re: Tha's only one side of the equation
The minimum water temperature for useful heating is 40C (a domestic gas boiler will go up to 85C), so this doesn't sound like a very sensible idea to me. I suspect the houses would need their own heat pumps to boost the temperature
That is indeed likely - especially as homes also need domestic hot water.
However, the CoP for a heat pump with a water source at 40˚C is going to be a lot higher than one with an air source at ... anything down to "brr, it's 'kin freezing". Also, the noise form a water source HP will be lower than from an air source, which would be good in densely populated areas.
Alternatively, the DC runs large heat pumps so they can send out "usably hot" water. Though I can see they'd want to charge more for the heat as it would cost them more.
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Thursday 1st October 2026 13:41 GMT midgepad
Other sides of the equation
(runn8ng your domestic heating and hot water at 85°C is a very bad idea. )
Domestic heat pumps are asked to move heat from outside at 273K or so to inside at 294K so offering them a source at 315 seems rather kind. The ground source ones can cool houses into th3 ground, and then warm them from the warmer ground in the evening or the other seasons. Again, heating some of the ground seems useful. Doing it on a scale larger than one house also seems sensible.
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Friday 25th September 2026 21:34 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Tha's only one side of the equation
"What's also omitted is the low quality and insulation of much of the UK's housing stock."
There are grants to help with that. Even without those, just going around and sealing up leaks can make a big difference. I bought a Cat S60 phone with an IR camera that told me a lot about where my house leaks heat. it's an older phone that isn't supported by the networks anymore so I got it cheap. It's also great for troubleshooting electronics.
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Friday 25th September 2026 09:47 GMT Mishak
A couple of questions
1) What happens when the factory or datacenter that's producing the heat goes bust / closes down / relocates?
2) What happens when the datacenter upgrades to energy efficient hardware that doesn't generate as much heat?
Whilst this may help to reduce the emissions from a district heating system, there is still going to be the need for other plant that can produce heat - though that could be cantered for by reserving space for plant to connect to the circuit as and when needed.
District heating can be (and has been) made to work, but it does need proper planning and management rather than being "managed" by net-zero zealots.
Also needs some proper regulation - my partner lives in a house that has district heating, and the charges are much greater than they would be with gas or a heat pump (and it is not possible to change supplier). The house is not permitted to have a gas supply connected to it - thought the other side of the road, which has just been developed, have all been connected to a new gas supply rather than the district heating system.
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Friday 25th September 2026 10:05 GMT gryphon
Re: A couple of questions
England is obviously a bit behind Scotland in that area then.
For Scotland new builds are not allowed to have gas or oil boilers as their main heating system so developers don't even bother getting gas infrastructure put in place.
England I think is 'expecting' new homes to use heat pumps etc. rather than gas boilers but don't require it.
And I would presume even with grants that it is a lot easier and cheaper for a developer to pay for gas network connection and chuck a £1500 gas boiler in rather than faff about with paying thousands for heat pumps and the specialised fitters they require. And all the redesign for radiator sizing etc.
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Friday 25th September 2026 10:37 GMT Helcat
Re: A couple of questions
So in Scotland, they also don't have gas cookers or hobs?
Makes sense, but it does mean that you're entirely reliant on electricity for heating and cooking as well as lighting and with EV's: Charging your car. That's putting a lot more load on the grid and dependency on power production, and if data centres are the priority for power: Hope you've solar, wind and battery backups at home else it'll be a cold, dark and hungry evening when the power goes out.
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Friday 25th September 2026 13:45 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: A couple of questions
> So in Scotland, they also don't have gas cookers or hobs?
In AU, the state of Victoria has done this too and I think they subsidise electrical heating, water heater and kitchen refits.
Here, gas is a lot more expensive per kJ than electricity so makes sense financially.
Heat pumps in the subtropics (and hotter) are incredibly efficient using electricity when both the Sun is shining on the photovoltaics and the air is warmest.
The downside is upfront cost, and noise of the compressor — the latter was the reason in suburbia of going with the conventional quieter Ohmic heating element. Several years ago living in the Boondocks the heat pump worked out at AUD 30.00 / quarter with a 340L tank.
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Friday 25th September 2026 15:24 GMT cyberdemon
Re: A couple of questions
Really? Electricity is cheaper per kJ than gas in oz?
For us poor old poms it's about 3 times the price..
There must be some contorted taxes/subsidies involved in that, otherwise you wouldn't have any gas fired power stations..
My worry with all-encroaching electrification though is that it reduces resilience, i.e. it both makes a blackout more likely and makes the consequences of a blackout much more severe
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Saturday 26th September 2026 15:32 GMT I could be a dog really
Re: A couple of questions
Speak for yourself.
If the lecky goes off, we still have hot water for a while (thermal store, passive heat exchanger for hot water.) We can put a pan on the gas hob for a brew. And the heating is low enough in power to run off an inverter (I changed it to plug in rather than hard wired a while ago), and when the battery gets low, can pull out the genny.
These days, for those who have solar and battery, running basics (lights, gas boiler, etc.) is fairly easy IF the system has been set up to support it (very few are) - but won't run electric heating for any length of time on a typical small battery size.
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Sunday 27th September 2026 01:41 GMT MachDiamond
Re: A couple of questions
"- but won't run electric heating for any length of time on a typical small battery size."
Using spare leccy to run a resistance heater in winter is fine, but it's more efficient to capture sunlight as heat and use that instead of electricity. Greenhill Forge on YT has been doing some interesting testing (in the UK as well). I'm looking for the bits to build a solar air heater to pipe into the clothes drier. I'd just put up a line for clothes, but my house doesn't have a fence around the property and there can be lots of wind. For some reason the city chose the front of my house for school buses even though no kids live close by and it's not that central for them so parents drop them off and pick them up (without much worry about sitting parked across my exit). Keeping the clothes inside works better for me. Not paying for propane to dry them would be better as well.
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Thursday 1st October 2026 09:45 GMT I could be a dog really
Re: A couple of questions
The push in the UK is for heat pumps - more efficient than resistance heating (until you get to very low outdoor temperatures), but still high power demand.
The discussion topic was "when the mains power goes off". Unless you have a very large energy store (whether that's battery for electric, or [some medium such as water] for thermal energy), then stored energy won't last you very long. On the other hand, since it's mostly passive infrastructure and storage is "easy", our mains gas supplies rarely fail - and the electricity needs to run the circulation pump and gas boiler are low enough that a modest sized battery (e.g. a car battery and inverter) would be able to run them for some time.
But in the UK, the eco-zealots are pushing really hard to get rid of gas in favour of all-electric for everything (even though it often gives higher running costs) - and the phrase "all your eggs in one basket" comes to mind.
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Sunday 4th October 2026 00:33 GMT MachDiamond
Re: A couple of questions
"But in the UK, the eco-zealots are pushing really hard to get rid of gas in favour of all-electric for everything (even though it often gives higher running costs) - and the phrase "all your eggs in one basket" comes to mind."
In many places, there's a ban on installing a functioning fireplace. Something decorative that runs on electricity is fine (just a light show).
My dad lived in the country where the power could go off for days at a time. The pot belly stove was heat for the house, water for washing up and cooking. The generator would be fired up to charge batteries and run the well pump. Everybody got their shower in during that time and the storage tank and horse watering troughs would be topped up as well. A trip to the loo might be proceeded by a trip to the storage tank with a water bucket. During the winter, the wood stove was the source of heat for the house. There was electric underfloor heating, but that was a last resort.
I'd like a wood stove myself, but the cost is high and I'd need to clear out dedicated space for it. For the 3 months of the year it would be useful, it's too much to pay. My solar heating works well and I'm adding more to it in a week so I should be even warmer this winter as long as it isn't overcast too much.
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Friday 25th September 2026 17:17 GMT elsergiovolador
Re: A couple of questions
> new homes to use heat pumps
That's probably another thing for permanently asleep civil servants to look into.
We don't make heat pumps (yes there are shops that "design" and assemble them in the UK, but core components are made overseas), so we are subsidising foreign economies.
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Friday 25th September 2026 21:48 GMT MachDiamond
Re: A couple of questions
"We don't make heat pumps (yes there are shops that "design" and assemble them in the UK, but core components are made overseas)"
I've watched some clever mods of window aircons into heat pumps. In the last one, the guy got a medium sized window unit from a skip. It was as dirty as a really dirty thing and I imagine it got replaced since it wouldn't chooch very well with the heat exchangers clogged. Cooling was his main concern so he built a tank around the hot side exchanger and circulated water through pipes he put in the ground. To make it work for heating and cooling takes some kit to recover the refrigerant and doing some plumbing that might make it worth just buying something built for purpose. Maybe water jackets around both exchangers could be made to work.
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Friday 25th September 2026 10:08 GMT Wellyboot
Re: A couple of questions
This!
District heating has to be the primary aim for the heat source, for any other commercial activity the excess heat generated is a by-product that is actively being reduced by increased hardware efficiency.
As for the higher costs in existing schemes, that's almost certainly down to it being old plant overdue for replacement - by more efficient systems.
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Friday 25th September 2026 10:37 GMT Like a badger
Re: A couple of questions
As for the higher costs in existing schemes, that's almost certainly down to it being old plant overdue for replacement - by more efficient systems.
No, not at all. I've worked for a very large company that has built heat networks in the UK, and owns several really large heat networks in Sweden and elsewhere. Most of the UK's currently operating heat networks (ignoring building-level systems for apartment blocks that don't really qualify as a district system) are pretty new. The higher costs are caused by (1) the fact this country can't build ANYTHING cheaply or efficiently, and (2) that a properly run district heating is a very complex, high capex system, and (3) that retrofitting a het network to serve existing properties is usually exceptionally costly to the point of being unviable. Even the basics of heat network infrastructure are a problem for the UK - you need twice the network distance of an equivalent gas supply (out and return), the pipes are larger and need thick insulation, so cost more and require much bigger trenches - as an indication, think £10k per linear metre of network, and then consider how much a network might cost per property served. If the system uses waste heat, then (a) it needs or the source need the capability to reliably dump the waste heat for around six months of the year as there won't be the space heating demand, and (b) it needs a full load standby heat source because waste heat invariably comes from sources that from time to time will either fail, or need to be taken out of use for upgrades or maintenance. The majority of UK district systems are gas CHP powered, and although their primary purpose is heating, they often make more money selling electricity into the grid at times of local distribution system stress - which means that if the local electricity system is not stressed, then that income stream is missing, and consumers pay the full system cost.
Most of the big systems in the Nordics faced these problems but were built of necessity because they pre-dated widespread gas availability, and replaced costly and inefficient oil or coal heating in countries where there were at the time no notable fossil fuel reserves. The systems in Eastern Europe (some of which I've worked on) were largely built as part of Soviet central plans, are costly, unreliable, inefficient, and almost exclusively fossil fuel driven.
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Friday 25th September 2026 12:06 GMT Jedit
"What happens when the datacenter that's producing the heat goes bust/closes down"
I appreciate you using the word "when" there. The likelihood is that datacentres will start going bust even before this project comes to full fruition.
But that in and of itself is an answer to your question. This is a boondoggle intended to throw some more millions to the preferred donor, and/or to provide an excuse for the government to keep propping up these companies with taxpayers' money.
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Sunday 27th September 2026 01:46 GMT MachDiamond
Re: "What happens when the datacenter that's producing the heat goes bust/closes down"
"The likelihood is that datacentres will start going bust even before this project comes to full fruition."
If the heat was being sourced from a power plant, putting money into a heat distribution network would make sense. Even if the power plant were decommissioned, the new generation plant could be built on that same site. Iceland has the best system as the Earth would have to cool significantly to make geothermal heat go away.
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Friday 25th September 2026 12:30 GMT Like a badger
Re: A couple of questions
Also needs some proper regulation - my partner lives in a house that has district heating, and the charges are much greater than they would be with gas or a heat pump (and it is not possible to change supplier). The house is not permitted to have a gas supply connected to it - thought the other side of the road, which has just been developed, have all been connected to a new gas supply rather than the district heating system.
Regulation can only do so much - and in this case it has already done quite a lot, because the planning requirements by the local authority are the regulations that stop switching or reversion to heat pump or gas. The specifics may be enacted as a covenant on the deeds, and look as though it's the property developer or supplier, but that's a response to the planning requirements.
A modern heat network in the UK costs around £16k per property, and with a cost of capital of say 10%, that requires £1,600 per property per year just to offer a return on investment to the organisation who own the network. On top of that there's system maintenance costs which might be around 4-7% of capex (another £640-1,000 per property), metering, billing and bad debt costs, and that's all before fuel and any emissions taxes. If running a gas powered CHP there will be a credit for exported power, but the value of that is hugely time and location dependant. What would you like regulation to do here: Require the network owner to operate at a loss? Subsidise heat networks from other people's energy bills or general taxation?
The main problem for heat networks is that there's all that heavy capex, but heat demand in summer is 10% of winter heat demand (can be as little as 3% of winter peaks), and that's a real problem both operationally and financially. Either assets run at partial load all year round (very bad for efficiency), or they have modular capacity plant where most of the units spend a minimum of six months a year out of use. Operators can either mothball for months at a time and then recommission when needed (expensive), or they cycle them in and out of use and up and down their operating range - slightly less expensive, but screws the asset reliability, and risking loss of heat supply to customers.
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Friday 25th September 2026 21:00 GMT DS999
Seems like it would make more sense
To co-locate industrial sites that could use that heat. Maybe a commercial laundry that launders stuff from the local hospital? If the heat could be sufficiently concentrated it could be used for making clinker for cement. Yes that concentration requires energy but so long as it is a large enough savings in either dollars or CO2 of the current process (typically involving natural gas) for heating clinker its a win.
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Sunday 27th September 2026 01:52 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Seems like it would make more sense
"To co-locate industrial sites that could use that heat. Maybe a commercial laundry that launders stuff from the local hospital?"
What's been hinted at by others is that needing multiple entities in the chain means that if any one of them goes away, the only thing left is for government to step in and subsidize. A complete refit could be quite a lot more. For the laundry, the hospital should own it since both operations would be entwined. They could always contract out the laundry operations. I think it's California that made (fixin' to make) a law that makes every hospital employee subject to a very high minimum wage. I expect that gift shops in hospitals will be contracted out if that solves the problem. The same goes for a hospital laundry. It's not a nice job, but it's not skilled so $35/hr isn't justified.
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Sunday 4th October 2026 00:39 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Seems like it would make more sense
"Commercial greenhouse operations?"
I've had that thought too. A greenhouse farm immediately adjacent could use the heat to grown high value crops such as lettuces, strawberries and citrus. Even if it couldn't be done all year without adding lighting, it could extent growing seasons. For open air citrus farms, adding some underground heating can keep a late frost from ruining the season.
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Thursday 1st October 2026 13:48 GMT midgepad
Re: A couple of questions
Are you suggesting that significantly higher efficiency is possible? That may be a Physics question.
Empirically though, the establishment will shove twice as much of it in, generating the same heat, hoping to pay the same rent, and dissipating the same amount of heat through the same cooling system.
You might think rejecting into and drawing from a heat store that serves several or many sources would be sensible, since new ones can be added or substituted, and there will be enough degree kilotonnes to allow some slack.
You know, networking, and res8lience, and so on.
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Friday 25th September 2026 10:32 GMT Wellyboot
Barge of water!
Even considering the possibility of building all the infrastructure requirements needed to ferry warm water by an expensive heavily insulated* electric barge is beyond belief. This incredibly niche idea has to be from a mad set of muppets with no thought for the technical requirements inherent in moving many hundreds (Thousands?) of tonnes of water daily.
Use a closed loop pipe to heat locally, it's why these schemes are labelled 'District'
*to keep the water warm
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Friday 25th September 2026 10:57 GMT Goodwin Sands
Re: Barge of water!
>niche idea has to be from a mad set of muppets
That was my first thought too - for muppets read civil servants, DESNZ ones especially. However it seems at least the shipping hot water in barges is a serious proposition from Cory Group who are looking for an additional revenue stream from the waste heat from their refuse incinerators at Erith. They're already generating some elec from the heat but are looking to sell what's left uptown to existing area heating projects like the one in Pimlico.
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Friday 25th September 2026 12:57 GMT Like a badger
Re: Barge of water!
Unless heavily pressurised and superheated, hot water is a very low grade heat resource, and its volumetric and gravimetric energy density is very poor. I can't see any way that tugging barges full of hot water 10km up the Thames can possibly be economic, and that's before the difficulty and cost of charge/discharge facilities, and how they'd integrate a supply of hot water that's likely to be (at best) just below the heat network's "outbound" temperature. The manpower alone for the barges would make it uneconomic by my reasoned guess. I'm guessing somebody at Cory knows how much waste heat they have but doesn't understand heat networks, and DESNZ are attracted to novelty like a magpie to glittery rubbish.
Fun fact: Until fairly recently (around eight years IIRC) London exported some municipal refuse to Sweden, where it was burned to power the Malmo district heating system. That was because the rubbish avoided fuel taxes and attracted credits for waste reuse, but the Swedes eventually worked out that this was a really daft idea, and the financial drivers were changed to exclude imported rubbish. The reason the Erith plant can't do that is because it is nowhere near any mass heating demand. Now, if they'd demolished all the low density housing of Millwall and built a refuse incinerator there, they could have used the waste heat for the Canary Wharf development (and built more of Canary Wharf towers and posh flats for oligarchs) on the southern half of the Isle of Dogs.
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Friday 25th September 2026 21:47 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
a mad set of muppets
for muppets read civil servants,
The BBC have made a couple of excellent documentaries on these civil servants...
General Assistance Department
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/b009smq5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_from_the_Ministry
Department of Administrative Affairs
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Friday 25th September 2026 11:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Surely this is some kind of a joke? Nobody with any grasp of physics or economics would serious believe this is a viable scheme. I know our current government are incredibly stupid, but surely they should have some advisers to provide some due diligence.
While 90M seems like a lot of money to us, it's probably small enough in government terms to avoid any kind of proper oversight. Whose pocket does that 90M of taxpayers money end up in and how are they related to the people making the decision to allocate the money?
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Friday 25th September 2026 12:14 GMT Like a badger
It is of course a government announcement, and it is therefore possible that this is a roll-up of previously announced and/or committed funding, or it is offers of funding "to be spent before 1 April" in the full knowledge that unless there's any ready to go causes then the money won't be spent. Never, ever trust a government claim to be committing money to anything.
As a ballpark figure, consider that a district heat system without waste heat bells and whistles will cost around £15-20k per property (as noted above, I've worked for companies in the sector). So £90m divided by DESNZ figure of 750,000 homes is £120 per property. I really can't see that money going far for customers, although if some pet project gets a big bung, then the people behind that will be pleased.
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Thursday 1st October 2026 09:58 GMT PB90210
Re: >Cough!< Battersea Power Station >Cough!<
I believe the pipes connecting Battersea PS to Pimlico still exist... and coincidentally the Pimlico estate it fed has been having problems with the replacement system in the last couple of years
TfL has at least one scheme set up to use waste heat from the underground network... and the coincidence here is that 100 years ago they advertised the deep level tube as being somewhere to escape the summer heat! (hard to imagine that after a trip on the Central Line)
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Friday 25th September 2026 14:13 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Another fine praline from the "Whizzo Quality Assortment"
The finest canine pure with a single origin dark chocolate couverture.
A long anticipated addition to their flagship assortment from the Great British Whizzo Chocolate Company certain to rank with the old favourites like Ram's Bladder Cup¹, Cockroach Cluster, Anthrax Ripple and Spring Surprise².
¹ Fresh Cornish ram's bladder, emptied, steamed, flavoured with sesame seeds whipped into a fondant and garnished with lark's vomit. ² Chocolate wrapped around two stainless steel bolts that spring out and plunge straight through both cheeks
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Friday 25th September 2026 18:01 GMT Like a badger
Re: Already happening
Heat meters have been around a long time, they're a reasonably well proven technology, and its been a legal requirement to fit them on heat networks (albeit with some derogations for existing networks) since the Heat Networks (Metering and Billing) Regulations came into force back in 2014.
They're not particularly expensive - manufacturing volumes are small, but the tech is not advanced - two temperature sensors (flow and return), a flow sensor for volume, and an IC to calculate the heat difference.
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Friday 25th September 2026 21:51 GMT MachDiamond
Do you wanna live next door?
Unless home are relatively close, the distribution cost would be too expensive. In a place such as Iceland where they've designed in heat as a utility and the benefit is so high that it makes loads of sense.
Free or cheap heat isn't something I see as a good trade for living next to one of that places.
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Sunday 27th September 2026 10:27 GMT steelpillow
Re: Do you wanna live next door?
Probably is if you work there, or run the lunchtime sandwich van.
They might even arrange indoor parking space for your e-bike. (As an aside, I've never understood why bikes must always go outside (or jam up the bottom of the staircase). We don't keep our wellies in open wellie sheds, yet we do build underground carparks with barriers and cctv)
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Sunday 27th September 2026 20:56 GMT MachDiamond
Re: Do you wanna live next door?
"(As an aside, I've never understood why bikes must always go outside (or jam up the bottom of the staircase)."
Because it's always been done that way or other very specious argument. It would be better to have a lockable bike locker. Metal lined for an eBike and separate from the house, JIC.
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Tuesday 29th September 2026 16:16 GMT bazza
Timing is everything.
It’ll fantastic in the day time when the data centre is nice and hot, because it is supporting the day’s economic activity. Pity no one will be at home to enjoy it.
It only makes sense (in the remotest possible interpretation of “sense”) if the day’s hot water is stored to be used in the evening when it would actually be useful. But with water of such low temperature you’d have to store and pump quite a lot of it to be useful.
