People in the UK may soon be able to save about 拢150 a year on their energy bills by using a data server to heat their water.
About 45 per cent of energy consumed in data centres is to stop servers overheating, even though there might be better uses for that excess heat.
Now, Heata, a start-up spun out of British Gas five years ago, has a solution that involves installing small data servers in people鈥檚 homes. The company鈥檚 shoebox-sized machines do away with cooling hardware and instead attach to a hot water tank.
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The server then uses the water tank as a heat sink to take waste heat away from the computer鈥檚 two processors, warming the water for showers or the washing-up.
The company has already run a trial with 20 homes and is now halfway through installing the devices for a larger trial 鈥� funded by the UK government 鈥� with 80 households, which will run for a year.
Chris Jordan, co-founder of Heata, says the devices will provide up to 4.8 kilowatt-hours of energy per day, which is about 80 per cent of the hot water demand of the average UK household.
The electricity use of the server is recorded by Heata and the cost of running it is reimbursed to the home owner. The company says that each home will save around 拢150 on its energy bills annually.
Jordan says the firm already has customers lined up to use the computer power available on the 80 servers, including architecture firms that need to do computer-intensive rendering of 3D animations.
The machines use the home鈥檚 broadband connection, sending what Heata says will be relatively small amounts of data via a secure VPN, but the company says it is in talks with internet service providers to create connections solely for the use of the servers so they wouldn鈥檛 eat into users鈥� data allowances. The units are fitted with alarms to notify the company if anyone tries to gain access to the internal components and all data transmission is protected by 256-bit encryption to stop unauthorised people accessing it.
Peter Lewis, a plumber working in Hertfordshire, UK, says the idea is practical in principle, but that the results of trials will reveal how realistic the concept is.
鈥淓verything helps, and everything will save money in the long run,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 perfectly safe, there鈥檚 nothing wrong with it. But as to how much heat [it generates] and the practicalities of installing it, it鈥檚 a question of whether it鈥檚 worthwhile or not.鈥�
