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Free hot water if you let us mount servers on your home tank (www.theregister.com)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The initial concept developed by the company involved using heat generated by Bitcoin mining rigs, according to Heata Co-founder and CTO Chris Jordan.

"We literally put a Bitcoin miner in a barrel of mineral oil and plumbed it up to a radiator," he told The Register.

Edit, because I think folks may be confused due to the quote I put in. They are not installing crypto miners into water heaters. That was just their original inspiration. Sorry for the confusion.

"We're not looking at serving real time workloads, we're not doing websites, databases, message queue servers," Jordan explained. "Our ideal job is; here's a chunk of data, go and process that for some hours. And here's the result," he said.

This could still prove useful for 3D rendering workloads, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and others where there is a lot of CPU or GPU processing, he claimed.

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[–] David_Eight 0 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

This is funded by the British government. So that hot water isn't so much free as funded by the British people.
From the article, it sounds like they're going to be using the customers Internet service.
This is not sending 100% of the heat into the hot water. You will be responsible for that excess heat. That's why these trials are being run during the winter time. Expect the cost to run your AC in the summer to go up.
Why would you wantonly let a billion dollar corporation into your home. When does that ever work out for people.
They are cutting a hole into the side of your hot water heater. If you or they decide not to continue with this who pays to repair that hole, I doubt it's the company.