[TYPE_FASTER]

This winter I'm going to experiment with having a Raspberry Pi act as a thermostat that starts/stops containers running on a server in our basement. That, combined with the laptop we just got for gaming that has a 3070 in it, should do nicely to supplement our heating system.

[Uehreka]

Watts go in, Watts come out. So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise.

I know that’s a bummer for people who want to heat their house with their computer, but Thermodynamics is always a bummer, I don’t make the Laws.

[matheusmoreira]

> So basically, find a space heater with the TDP of your server, and that’s the upper bound on what you can expect heating-wise.

I wonder how many CPUs I need to build a cryptocurrency miner water heater... That would be so much better than just wasting energy heating up dumb elements.

[buildbot]

That's why I heat my house with a dell C4140! The _lowest_ power throttle it has is 1.4KW.

[bparrish0]

Modern heat pumps provide a lot more than 100% efficiency. I'd stick to the heating system unless those containers are doing something profitable (mining?)

[chris37879]

Literally nothing provides 100% efficiency. You're conflating coefficient of performance with efficiency. They're not even close to the same thing, modern heat pumps reach their CoP because they don't actually generate heat, they simply move it around, which provides more heat indoors than if you had converted an equivalent amount of electricity directly into 100% heat.

Thermodynamics would not take kindly to you having a >99.999...% efficient anything.

[NathanielK]

> because they don't actually generate heat Heatpumps still do use electricity(or other power), and all that electricity also ends up as heat. It's why heatpumps have higher CoP than the same system as a refrigeration cycle.

> Thermodynamics would not take kindly to you having a >99.999...% efficient anything

Well the cogen gas powerplants here can produce 50kWh of electricity from burning 100kWh of natural gas. I can use 50kWh of electricity to put 200kWh of heat into my house with a heatpump.

Seems like a good deal to me, and I think carnot would be fine with that.

[Dylan16807]

Nobody said "thermodynamic efficiency". You're butting in for no good reason.

Coefficient of performance is a type of efficiency.

> modern heat pumps reach their CoP because they don't actually generate heat, they simply move it around

That's not even true! What a mess of a pedantic correction.