- Data Center Waste Heating can be recycled to provide free home heating
- Heatas British gas -backed trials test using the server heat to hot water
- The system reduces energy bills by transforming data processing heat into savings
Data centers and supercomputers generate a lot of waste heat and this can be used to warm home for free.
The latest innovation is a British gas -backed experiment from Heata that will test how computer server heat can be recycled to provide free hot water to the UK.
The company’s system channels heat from intensive data processing directly to a home hot water cylinder, cutting energy bills and reducing the need for energy -intensive cooling in traditional data centers. A calculation unit is attached to the hot water cylinder that forms part of the Heata network -a ‘virtual data center’ that processes cloud computing workloads while providing free hot water. Of course, this means you need a hot water cylinder – it can’t be used if you have a combination part.
To save families money
“Waste heating is a major problem for data centers leading to significant energy costs for cooling,” noted Chris Jordan, co -founder of Heata. “Still, hot is valuable. On the other side of the coin you have an energy crisis and people who are struggling to warm their homes. Our unique technology brings these two things together. We have created a distributed ‘virtual data center’ where the servers are attached to household cylinders that are possible for the heat generated by the data processing that can be reused to provide free hot water in the home. “
Each unit can supply up to 4 kWh of hot water daily, potentially saving households up to £ 340 per day. Year. British gas has launched a 10-unit trial in the employees’ homes that run its own data processing workloads while delivering free hot water as a by-product.
“Innovative projects like this are another example of how the United Kingdom becomes a leader in cutting carbon emissions,” added Paul Lodwidge, head of energy product and suggestions on British Gas.
“Heata is a real pioneer in the way it has developed a solution that can recycle waste heat and deliver significant costs and carbon savings. We are proud to be able to support them with this latest test and will work together to share insights and experience it will enable the company to scale up its offer.
It’s an idea we’ve explored in the past – by 2024 we reported how British scientists were looking to store excess heat generated by the University of Edinburgh’s Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) in abandoned mining work, and then distributing this to households via heat pumping technology.
Recently, we covered some of the many ways in which data center waste heating is used in projects throughout Europe.
