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Struggling to heat your home? Try 500 Raspberry Pi units (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 day ago by MHLoppy@fedia.io to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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UK Power Networks trials Thermify's HeatHub boilers, swapping gas flames for clustered compute

Reusing heat from servers has gained momentum recent years, but UK Power Networks (UKPN) is taking an unusual approach: installing mini datacenters powered by Raspberry Pi hardware in customers homes to provide heating for families struggling with energy costs.

UKPN, which manages the "last mile" of cables and substations delivering electricity from the National Grid to customers in the South East of England, is piloting the project as part of its SHIELD (Smart Heat and Intelligent Energy in Low-income Districts) program.

This will equip participating households with solar and battery systems, while one-third will also receive the "HeatHub" system - a compact datacenter roughly the size of a large heat pump that replaces traditional gas boilers. [...]

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[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Bitcoin bros actually did this at one point by making a space heater that was also a Bitcoin miner.

You get heat at similar energy efficiency to just running a regular space heater, but it pays back part of the energy bill with Bitcoin it mines. You could see how this could probably be adapted to other things, like what's mentioned in the article (distributed cloud compute).

The main issue is that space heaters and other in-home heat generation units are still infinitely less efficient than things like heat pumps in many circumstances, since those can reach over 100% efficiency since they only transfer heat, rather than having to generate it from scratch.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 day ago

I'm not sure I'd say infinitely less efficient. It's a 5-6x difference, which is still very significant on the electric bill.