Douglas Roberts wrote:
My toes are basking in the warm breeze from the back of my AMD64 server as I type this. In the summer I open a window.Nick Frost wrote:
I'm with Doug here (warming myself by the heat of my computer). Don't look at your computer as an inefficient information processing machine, but rather as a space heater which gets (some) useful computation out the conversion of electricity to heat! Living in a house that is heated entirely by solar and wood (2 cords/winter), I don't feel bad about a few extra KW of electricity driving some informatically interesting work along the way to becoming heat in my house. I LOVE how warm my MacBook Pro gets sitting in my lap on a frosty day like today! If I ever get my homemade wind-generator online, I will need extra load on windy days anyway! I'll be adding resistive heaters to my house to shunt any overload into (winter only). I think I'll go pull some of my mothballed computers out of the shed and set them up to do SETI (or protein folding)-at-home projects, distributed around the cold spots in my house. The (relative) low efficiency of their operation is a boon in this case! I'll never look at an electric blanket or space-heater the same again! Does anyone know how many KW-hours they use in their "conventional" homes? My biggest power draws are the fan for my active solar panels (drawing hot air into a rock bed in the floor) and my well (when irrigating), I can't imagine that forced-air furnaces don't draw more electricity than my solar system and that most folks add spot-electric heat to their gas-furnace heated homes as well? Thanks Doug! - Steve |
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