A little while ago, the concierge of my apartment building came to me about some issue with the central heating system. Totally unaware about the issue, I let him check some things in the apartment. Then he told me that apparently my thermostat has been turned off all the time. So I think that my servers may very well have been the primary source of heat for this apartment for several weeks. Servers, the new type of central heating system that even does useful work in the process!! Can we get some wanketeers on this to make it a product? 🙃

You're too late man, that already happened. Like for cloud stuff and for crypto mining. In a fancy package dressed like a wooden space heater

soo.. basically it means IoT radiators :)

@netikras o no

It could be, but if your room is small enough then your body heat will do some decent work as well. That and neighbors. 2 winters ago I was living in small room and had to use heating only for about a week when it was -20 to -15 outside.

I haven't used my heating for the last 2 years - if it gets cold i let my computer render something over night ^^

@irene i know but i pay a flat rate anyways so i might as well put it to use :P

@irene much less so, as heaters are just resistive elements (i.e. a power resistor, usually a couple of ohms only, to have it pass a lot of current directly from the mains to convert into heat) and a fan to get it to move out and into the area to be heated. That's literally the least efficient method to heat that I can imagine. Resistors are in my opinion at least a very bad thing when used for power applications. Sure it's the most effective method, but effective doesn't mean efficient. Resistors have inefficiency as a feature. Disgusting!!

Having the waste heat of something that does useful work be reused as a heat source on the other hand.. imo that's great, because not only are you doing useful work with the energy given, but also tapping into its residual waste heat to do even more useful work, i.e. heating the surrounding area.