‘I heat my Essex home with a data centre in the shed’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rpy7envr5o
Posted by High-Tom-Titty
‘I heat my Essex home with a data centre in the shed’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rpy7envr5o
Posted by High-Tom-Titty
13 Comments
I love the idea but I wouldn’t want my company data in some guys shed.
I’d expect dual power, dual networking and extremely strong physical security, doesn’t sound cost effective from the data centre point of view.
£375 a month for energy on a 2 bed seems steep? Ours is 4 bed and ~£240 in the winter and we have the fire and heating on loads, I refuse to work all week and be cold in my own home, that’s including charging a car overnight too.
Its subsidised those persons bills yes, but its not actually green because its still costing a fortune in energy.
> The project is still in the pilot phase, but in the future, clients will pay Thermify to process their data using the HeatHubs.
Lol. Two-tier data processing.
I wonder how this works in the summer where you want to get rid of excess heat.
Incredible moustache on Daniel Greenwood from Eastlight in that article.
There are space heaters you can buy now that are also bitcoin miners.
I work in the data centre sector and this isn’t new, just a much smaller and localised scale.
We build edge DCs and all of our sites are designed to be heat networked, so we can supply excess heat to neighbouring businesses and residences as a form of district heating.
I’m not sure how viable this proposal is for most people, but it is an interesting idea.
Just saw this an another thread.
This is such a daft idea.
Yep, how the hell do they get SOC2 or ISO27k certification with a shed in some random fellas back garden?
No company would support this when forking out for cloud services.
Right to audit incoming….
That doesn’t make any sense, the electricity needed to power a mini data centre would cost £100’s extra per month. Even if you’re passing that cost onto the data user it doesn’t make it green unless you have wind turbines or solar I guess.
I have a desktop PC in my lounge that is rarely used for gaming. Just playing an fps for a few years heats the room from 21 to 26+ and means I have to open the patio doors
IT guy here. So I don’t see how 500 raspberry pis that’s drawing under load 6000watt is going to suddenly send the bills to 40 quid. I don’t use any gas in my house so the gas usage is 0. But the electricity bills are £300 quid a month.
I have a Homelab and believe me the bills don’t go down. The only way you’d be able to make any money back is by selling the compute. Ask /r/homelab!
It’s not an awful idea.
You could rack up 4x 5090’s and produce 2400W of heat while being paid. People do pay for GPU time, it’s in high demand.
Of course though you can’t compete with Chinese or American GPU time since they have cheaper electricity but you can produce heat (which I’m sure could be dumped into heating water) and generate a bit of money in theory.
You know.. that raises an interesting point. Some nordic countries have communal heating services. I feel data centres could form a pipeline for that. Mainly because it’s more efficient to provide it centrally at scale, than individually, especially when living closer to the Arctic Circle where it’s fuck-off cold.
Thing is, this country isn’t often cold enough to benefit from such a thing.
One thing I did like, when playing games on a computer that ultimately needs to exhaust air at 50°+ it does heat the room in winter.
Horrendous in summer. But heat, often byproduct of wasted energy, does have some use.