Well, computers heating your house, the idea is out there and there are small companies like Nerdalize trying to get ahead on this idea of heat recovery, how ingenious. We all know are computers kick out a bit of heat, our desktops and laptops will power up the fans to try and cool themselves down. There was a story a few years back about the dangers of having laptops nestled on our bare legs and the burns that they could cause. So, is there a way to put this latent energy to good use?
Usually more energy is needed to then cool these computers, well have a think about the amount of energy required to cool vast blocks of computers. What about servers and server stacks, all that is required for you to tap away at Google and get instant information back in a nano-second.
What that actually means is that somewhere there is probably a vast room with stacks of servers working away kicking out crazy amounts of heat and air conditioning units trying really hard to cool the whole thing down.
So what if all this energy was used to heat our homes and offices instead? That’s precisely what some tech savvy people have done. The founders of Nerdalize, Mathijs de Meijer (CTO), Boaz Leupe (CEO) and Florian Schneider (COO) have come up with the plan to capture all that energy and allow it to heat our rooms. After a central heating break down and being really cold a few ideas were tried to remedy the situation but the one that stuck and was the ‘brainwave’ was the idea of whether a 100 laptops could be used to heat the space.
This developed into a computer housed within a radiator that sits on the wall just like any normal radiator but instead of water, its filled with circuitry. They are connected to the internet and the idea is that vast servers can be in individual homes but linked up via fibre optic cables.
The plan is that whilst data is being crunched the heat is kicked out to heat rooms but when the room is at the correct temperature the cooling system can kick in a normal way and dispel the heat to the outside via fans. There is also a plan for when the tech radiators aren’t doing anything but the occupier still requires heat, they can go ahead and start number crunching on fake sums to keep them going and generating a heat source.
When you think about how much energy is consumed by data centres, its 1.5% of all energy consumption globally, there is a major cost to the environment. With up to a third of a companies bills relating to the air conditioning required for cooling the servers, surely there is a monetary aspect to this that will help Nerdalize to get ahead. Nerdalize has a very practical solution to the problem and hopefully other companies will see it too. Currently they are trialing this technology, one of these is Leiden University Medical Centre.
Whether this technology truly takes off who knows, we can but see. They will need to big companies like Microsoft to actively take part in a huge transformation. Imagine the day when an office block could be powered by the very machines that enable the business to function.