this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
300 points (98.4% liked)

Not The Onion

18308 readers
3039 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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. [...]

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Steve@startrek.website 12 points 1 day ago (3 children)

If you need heat, mining anything is free money.

[–] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 7 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Nothing is free. Your equipment depreciates, so you need to account for that. Might be worthwhile if you have solar panels, a battery and use dynamic pricing. So you can charge the battery with solar and when electricity costs next to nothing, so you can run the equipment for heating of the battery when you get home in the afternoon which is usually when electricity prices go up. But end of the day it’s cheaper to just burn gas or use a heat pump if you just want to heat your home. And the heat a GPU array generates is probably not enough. The more efficient the GPU is with mining the less heat it generates, so the heat output per dollar input goes down. Not to mention the cost of a single GPU or ASIC miner.

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 14 points 1 day ago

That's only true if we're comparing GPU mining to resistive heating. Both are equally efficient at converting electrical energy to heat: 100%.

The numbers don't look nearly as good when we compare GPU mining to a heat pump. Heat pumps utilize an additional, uncounted source of free energy (outdoor heat). Since we aren't counting that additional energy, the electrical efficiency of the heat pump is much greater than 100%.

[–] MHLoppy@fedia.io 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you don't have enough GPU power to meet your heating needs, there's a capital cost to get more (and depending on your existing setup, likely even more capital costs for other components to be able to run it in a separate system).

[–] scottrepreneur@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

Not to mention electricity