[leonroy]

I'm actually inclined to take this fairly seriously.

I personally run a 36U rack of servers in my basement for learning and hosting for my business. It gets toasty enough that the basement temperature hovers around 30-35C.

On cold days we open the door to the basement and the warm air rises into the ground floor, giving a bit of warmth.

On warm days I have a temperature controlled fan which vents the air to the outside.

My house has central heating but if it had central air I'm pretty sure an exhaust from the top of the rack to the central air unit would be do-able (not sure what HVAC building codes I'd be compromising though).

Puget Systems did a great blog post titled 'Space Heater vs Gaming PC'. They basically found they were tied in the efficiency of heat output from both devices.

Source: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Gaming-PC-vs-Spac...