Households in the UK could soon save around £150 a year (€180, $190) on their energy bills thanks to a new technology. It's a system that uses excess heat from servers in data centers to heat water.
It seems incredible, but almost 50% of the energy used in data centers to cool servers is wasted. It could be used more efficiently.
Heata, power from servers
The start-up Heata, founded by British Gas five years ago, has developed an innovative solution that involves installing small data servers the size of a shoebox in homes.
These machines use a water tank as a heat sink, replacing typical computer cooling hardware. In this way, the heat generated by the server's two processors is used to heat water for showering or washing dishes.
Heata has already successfully tested its system in 20 homes and is now carrying out a larger trial, funded by the UK government, involving 80 households. The installation of the servers, which will last a year, is already halfway there.
More inventiveness, less waste
Second Chris Jordan, co-founder of Heata, each device could deliver up to 4,8 kilowatt hours of energy per day, which is about 80% of hot water demand of an average UK household.
Heata records the electricity consumption of the server and reimburses the running cost to the homeowner, who will save, as mentioned, around £150 per year on his bill (it's like having one less bill per year, but it depends on consumption ).
And the startup UK what does it gain? Heata already has customers waiting to use the servers for compute-intensive needs, such as architecture firms that need to render 3D animations.
Let's face it
The idea of creating distributed data centers, with a network of small "home" servers which in exchange also offer a small saving in bills is not a bad thing. If you want more details, you find them here. By eye, it brings advantages to everyone, even if they are small and perhaps only on large numbers.
Or rather: we'll understand if this is the case from this year's tests, but the solution is very creative and deserves further study. So, if it works even with a small positive balance, why not make it?
