Data centres expend a lot of energy and effort into cooling all their server racks, at the same time energy bills are going through the roof and people can't afford to heat their homes.

Why not connect your home heating loop to a liquid cooled server rack instead and advertise some cheap spot pricing whenever you are feeling cold. Maybe only useful for machine learning applications as GPU safe operating temperatures are over 100C.
-- gizmo, Sep 10 2022

Lots of insulated piping needed for this. Pumps that need power, backup systems.

If a community was planned around this from the start might be employable to some extent but retrofitting a city with something like this wouldn't be very practical. But [+] anyway.
-- doctorremulac3, Sep 11 2022


Whatever the idea is, I love it. It could be the stupidest idea ever posted here and I'd still love it due strictly for the reason that Sir gizmo entered it in for evidence.
-- blissmiss, Sep 12 2022


People were talking about this maybe 10 or 20 years ago.
It's a great idea, but at least at that point the cost savings were marginal because residential electricity is rather more expensive than industrial electricity (for several reasons).

The other thing is that usually you want your data centres to be running all the time, but home heating is generally not consistent. Maybe if you merged it with one of the developing heat storage technologies, though...
-- Loris, Sep 12 2022



random, halfbakery