Kethal

You like this episode of Futurama. Would you also like to watch this episode of Futurama?

I suspect the reasoning here is going to not be obvious so some people so I'll add a little. Heat pumps are more efficient when there's a larger difference between where they're getting heat and where they're putting it. I'm going to call this difference a gradient, because otherwise later I'll be saying "differences of differences" which gets confusing. The argument here is that moving heat from compartmentalized 90 degrees server room to outside at 95 degrees with a separate system for the house, moving from 75 degrees to 95 degrees, would be more efficient than a single heat pump moving air from the mixed rooms at 80 degrees to 95 outside.

The magnitude of that effect would depend on how nonlinear the relationship between efficiency and the gradient is. I'm not very familiar with that. I assume it's nonlinear, but whether it's highly nonlinear from a gradient of 5 to a gradient of 20. From here, it's quite nonlinear from a gradient of 25 to 40, but from 5 to 20 it's pretty linear: https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=heat%20pump%20effeciecy%20vs%20temperature%20gradient#id=598B80C1EB5A721C392964CB7708512FC496B78F

This also doesn't consider that these are operated with thermostats. Presumably someone is going to set all of the thermostats to the same temperature, 75 degrees or whatever the preference is. The gradient at which the pumps start will be the same in all cases, and the difference will be in how often the pumps run. There will differences in the average efficiency because of the time difference, but it's by no means obvious to me that there would be a significant benefit for a typical home. I would want some clear evidence before spending money on this.

Edit: I said they're more efficient when there's a larger gradient, but I should have said the efficiency depends on the size and direction of the gradient. When the gradient is positive, it's less effecient. Overall, the conclusion is the same. It's dubious that, for this case, using two heat pumps with compartmentalized rooms provides a tangible benefit over a single pump with mixing.

This covers it all well, but I think a simple explanation is that although "W/m^2/x" looks the same on the axes, it's not the same. f=1/w, so one axis is W/m^2/f and one is W/m^2*f. The article makes a big deal out of the differences as if the x axis were the only difference, but they're just very different things being plotted.

Heat pumps are great, but what this guy is saying is wrong. Generating heat in the thing you're trying to cool won't help save any money no matter the technology.

Let's say you were deliberately trying to heat something and cool something else, like a water heater and your home. Then heat pumps are doubly effective. Maybe that's where the confusion in this comment stems from, but that's not what's going on with a data center.

I thought about making a comment and decided it didn't matter, but skeezix gave me the opportunity to do it indirectly.

BSD and Linux are offshoots of Unix.

You can edit posts.

Am I blind? I don't even see where it names the study. It just says Pew, who publishes many studies. Does medium expect me to search for their sources?

The creators call it an inverse vaccine. A vaccine causes the immune system to recognize a compound to attack. This treatment causes the immune system to ignore a compound it had previously recognized. So they are specifically saying it's not a vaccine (and OP is misrepresenting them), even though that word is in the phrase, something roughly like antivenom is not a venom.

I have a center channel. New shows sound like crap. Old ones sound great. It's not people's equipment.

What an obnoxious conclusion they have - we need to buy better speakers. I have good speakers. Old things sound great, but new shows sound like crap. This is their problem to fix, not ours.

Yeah, the color scheme is the real clue there. It's pretty subtle what their viewpoint is.