Do You Know That The Heat Generated From The Internet Can Be Used to Keep Your Homes or Offices Warm?

Today I'm going to explicate about an interesting piece of technology that I read recently on BBC news website about a company called Nerdalize who launched internet powered heaters known as “nerd power”.

_[1]

What the heck does that mean?

They’re going to be taking advantage of the heat that servers provide and actually using it to heat people's homes or offices.

If you don't know, a lot of companies like Microsoft, Google have these server farms where they basically have these computer servers just running and they create a lot of heat and it costs a lot of money to vent this heat and keep these servers cool, it's really quite of a nuisance but some smart people came up with the idea to harvest this heat and actually use it without wasting it.

They came up with the idea to actually put individual servers “Nerdalize eRadiator” in people's homes as a heating unit so it would heat people's homes basically for free.

You're probably wondering exactly how it works.

Basically, the company said it's going to cost 400-500 euros (£290-360) and they install this unit which might have two to three servers in it and it has to be connected to an outside wall. The server is a tamper-proof casing and it's all encrypted so you can't just access the files on it and the server processes all the data, you need to have a fiber internet connection obviously so it's fast enough.

The server records how much electricity it's using and then that gets sent to the company and the company actually pays that amount of money to the person's home so they don't have to pay for that electricity that the server used.

_{[2]Nerdalize eRadiator}

It generates around 1,000 watts of heat and apparently, it can heat up a small room or office in the wintertime and in the summer, it actually pumps out the heat and instead of going into the room, it goes out through a vent which is why it needs to be on an outside wall.
They obviously took into consideration that you don't want to have a heater running during the summer so it probably would be negligible for heat generated in the summer.

Apparently, this idea is not very new because in 2008 in Zurich, IBM actually used servers to heat a local swimming pool for a town so they obviously found other ways to harness that heat generated instead of wasting it and paying for the electricity for nothing. I definitely think this is a good idea if they can implement it well and I think the biggest problem is going to be making sure the servers are secure because I think most people won't even care about it but some smart hackers might be interested in getting there and see what's going on.

I definitely think it'll be enough heat because I know that in the summer, just running my computer if I'm playing video games, my computer alone generates quite a bit of heat and in summer, my room sometimes goes up to 80 degrees in it and its crazy. I also think it might be an issue to try and maintain these things because obviously, servers break down so if you buy this thing and it starts messing up, are they gonna send people coming in your house fixing the server every time?

I'm sure they will address that kind of stuff. You guys can let me know what you think, share your thoughts by replying this post and don’t forget to give an upvote.

---

---

References: 1 - 2

Image sources: 1 - 2

---

---

_{GIF made by @foundation}

---

---

Thanks to @camzy & @samstickkz for this amazing toon.