Server farms generate immense amounts of waste heat. Now a UK company called Heata" is trialling a way to recycle this heat and help householders with their energy bills. Basically a server farm is distributed among private houses. Each house has a server unit attached to their hot water tank, which absorbs the heat generated. The electricity used by the server is logged and the householder is reimbursed for it. The use of the units is rented out to firms who need to do computer-intensive tasks like 3D-animation. I suppose any company which rents out servers could distribute their units in a similar way.

At present, the necessary information goes out through the household's broadband connection using a VPN (which would make it unsuitable for people like me), but in the future, ISP's could provide a side channel paid for by the server company.

This sounds like a combination of several terrible ideas.

Then you read...
The current UK government is paying to have black box computers put into people's homes...

There's no data harvesting involved other than the server's own electricity consumption. It's not like a smart meter, that records exactly when you switch equipment on or off (a boon to burglars if they can tap into that information stream). Now they really do seem sinister to me...

Not likely to work - for a start off, we have a glass fibre tank! :lol:

You are quite correct there.

Not to mention the physical security of the server is now completely absent...

Hmmm... I reckon this wouldn't work for most people with gas fired central heating as modern gas boilers are the condensing type... No hot tank needed as hot water supplied on demand.

My tank was removed when I had the boiler upgraded well over ten years ago.

My

Play Bonny!

Downtown Detroit used to be served by free Detroit Edison Electric steam. That idea was 100 years old.

However if I had enough free heat I could use it for AC system.

I could be a bit off on the scale here, but most single servers I've ever seen generally draw significantly under 1kW in normal operation, which is paltry (in terms of BTU output) for a water heater even in a residential setting. Just from a fast search, electric tankless heaters look to be somewhere in the 15-30kW range, models with a storage tank are like 1/10 that. So exactly how many servers are they installing here? Not to mention the questions over the water going through them for cooling - are they planning to run straight tap water from the residential supply pipes (made of whatever they are, with whatever is upstream) directly through the server's cooling loop? How are they going to deal with galvinic corrosion? I can't imagine they're going to the expense of trying to cool the server via immersion and then installing heat exchanges to the water (not to mention there are known patent trolls associated with that concept).

From reading a bit on their site - they almost immediately are talking about mineral oil immersion to a radiator/exchanger, so this idea is likely to be entirely workable in the US (I don't know if it will survive in the UK) because of patent trolls, but could address a lot of the above concerns. That said, some of their artwork implies they also have 'backup' immersion heaters, so I'm guessing this is more of an 'optimistic heat capture' kind of thing, where the server puts *some* of the heat into the water, and the rest is from a conventional immersion heater element to ensure the temperature is where it needs to be the rest of the time. Not so insane of an idea but looks very inefficient unless the server expects 100% load. I also noted in some of their examples and slides they're talking about cryptocurrency mining and bitcoin/'the blockchain' - there's elements of this that look neat but "a combination of several ideas" is probably more accurate.