this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
54 points (98.2% liked)

Solarpunk

5687 readers
73 users here now

The space to discuss Solarpunk itself and Solarpunk related stuff that doesn't fit elsewhere.

What is Solarpunk?

Join our chat: Movim or XMPP client.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

The key in this case would be finding somewhere to put the waste heat from the computer, where you would normally be paying to add heat in the first place. That's why you need to specify electric tank water heaters to make this idea work. You would be using energy to keep the water hot anyway, might as well do some additional work with that energy first.