The Dutch start-up Nerdalize and electricity provider Eneco have started a pilot to heat homes with computer servers called eRadiators. When the eRadiators are calculating, they generate free heat for homes.
The hardware has been developed by the Dutch start-up Nerdalize. The heating system, of which the casing has been developed by a design company, uses waste heat of several Xeon CPUs that heat their direct environment. The eRadiator is able to deliver about 1Kw of power, which should be, according to Eneco and Nerdalize, sufficient to heat a living room. The server doesn't contain ventilators and is passively cooled.
Nerdalize pays the end user the costs of the consumed power. This should save an average household about €400 ($440) on their bill. The test, which involves 5 homes, should last 9 months and should give insights in the actual savings.
The available computational power in the eRadiator system is distributed through the internet by a cloud service. Nerdalize sells the decentralized distributed computer power to companies and researchers. The startup hopes that with the eRadiator setup it can lower costs with up to 55% compared to similar services from Amazon and Google. The reduction in costs is mainly achieved because no physical datacenter has to be built with expensive onsite staff and even more expensive power consuming cooling systems.
The current design of the eRadiator only allows mounting on outside walls which allows easily eliminating excessive heat in the summer. Currently other heat dispense methods are investigated. Besides the outside wall mounting requirement, also a fast internet connection is required, with a preference for fiber.
When the system has no paid jobs available, Nerdalize hopes to run medical research on the eRadiators.
