Data Furnaces: Free Heating, for Those with Fiber Internet

Posted on May 29, 2015  Comments (2)

Data furnaces have arrived in the Netherlands offering free heating for those with fiber internet connections. Those running data centers spend a lot of money cooling them off or thinking of ways to keep cooling costs down Google Uses Only Outside Air to Cool Data Center in Belgium (weather should provide free cooling for all but about 7 days a year).

Nerdalize is offering an interesting engineering solution to this issue. Even better than eliminating cooling costs this idea will use the excess heat to warm people’s houses.

By placing high performance servers in homes Nerdalize creates highly distributed compute cloud without the overhead cost of conventional cloud and co-location solutions. This creates a triple-win where sustainable computing power becomes an affordable commodity, homes are heated for free and emissions are drastically reduced!

This structural cost advantage allows us to offer computing power that is up to 55% more affordable than major cloud-providers or co-location solutions whilst giving incredible performance.

The Nerdalize heater contains high-performance servers in the form of a radiator and allows for them to be placed in your home safely and secure. As Nerdalize covers the cost of electricity, the heat generated by computations, such as medical research, heat your home for free.

image of the Eneco eRadiator

The Eneco eRadiator

The installation of a server heater, the Eneco eRadiator, in the living rooms of five families at different locations in the Netherlands this month starts a field test of the units. The purpose of the test is to collect information on customer experience and to identify possible areas of improvement of the eRadiator.

Sign up on their website if you want free heating (Netherlands is likely the best bet but they may expand around Europe also, or even further).

Related: Google Lets Servers Stay Hot, Saving Air Conditioning CostsData Center Energy Needs

2 Responses to “Data Furnaces: Free Heating, for Those with Fiber Internet”

  1. Luke
    June 3rd, 2015 @ 5:33 am

    This is very interesting, but what about summers, and the days when people don’t need heat? They can’t simply shut-down the heating, because the servers will overheat.

    I guess that a good solution to this is for the servers to warm the water, or anything that needs to be warm in the summer.

    However, this is a very ingenious way of cooling your servers; this might be a hit in northern countries, such as Finland, Sweden etc.

  2. curiouscat
    June 4th, 2015 @ 3:21 am

    They say on their web site (linked to above) that in the summer heat is vented outside so you have no warming of the house. Though, I imagine, you would have to have some tiny amount of heating going on even if they vent it outside but it could be kept to a negligible amount with good engineering.

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