Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 100 posts

Re: Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

#71

Post by chasd00 »

pocksuppet wrote: post #62
gigatree wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, is there some hidden downside to living by a data center? Northern VA real estate is super pricey but they’ve got tons of them

The new ones are being built with massive numbers of unpermitted gas turbines with the exhaust filters removed, because there's not enough electricity and there isn't enough grid power and exhaust filtering costs money. So they're giving entire nearby towns asthma. They're also so loud the whole town can't sleep. Data centers were, and still can be, some of the cleanest industrial facilities - but the ones being buil…

> The new ones are being built with massive numbers of unpermitted gas turbines with the exhaust filters removed

That’s every local investigative journalist’s wet dream. Can you link us to a source please?

PS saw an interview with he who shouldn’t be named and they made an interesting point that there isn’t a way to scale the manufacturing of gas turbine blades, there will never be enough gas turbines for these DCs to come online as scheduled.

Re: Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

#72

Post by throwaway27448 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #64
pocksuppet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, and should, keep it in case you have less revenue next year though.

You can do this up to a point but if it looks like you're actually making a profit it might raise questions eventually. Keeping enough to cover one year's operating costs is pretty common though.

God forbid a non-profit try and compete honestly

Re: Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

#73

Post by chasd00 »

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #59
victorbjorklund wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is one of those things that sounds good, but it's not. It's probably cheaper to build it far away from residential areas, and it's probably better for the people living there to not live too close to a data center.

why must we tear up undeveloped areas for data centers instead of backfilling vacant industrial areas? Humanity will never rest until all of the world is a brownfield

The current NIMBY trend with respect to DCs guarantees it.

Re: Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

#74

Post by SoftTalker »

meindnoch wrote: post #61
matheusmoreira wrote: post #13

Is it feasible to do this at smaller scales? Would be cool to use my compurers to heat water at home. Put all that useless heat to good use. Air conditioners could do it too, right? Pump heat into a water reservoir instead of just throwing it away?

>Air conditioners could do it too, right? Some heat pumps do this. E.g. Panasonic Aquarea EcoFleX. When cooling the house, the domestic hot water tank is used to dump heat into (up to a certain temperature).

Years ago I worked at a fast-food restaurant and they used all the heat from their ice makers to pre-heat water for washing up.

Re: Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

#75

Post by swiftcoder »

dn3500 wrote: post #28

What a useless article! I found some actual information here: https://www.techspot.com/news/97995-data-center-uses-waste-h... The "data center" produces about 28 kW of heat and the swimming pool has cut its gas bill by 62%. They are saving US$24,000 per year.

> They are saving US$24,000 per year.

Keeping in mind that the datacenter operator is also paying the power bill for that (which presumably is roughly 28 kW), amounting to something like £65,000/year at current UK rates

Re: Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

#76

Post by chasd00 »

lvspiff wrote: post #34
gruez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it's just cheaper to build further away from residential areas? For this to work you'd need to be close to residential areas, but that's where you get the most NIMBY opposition. And if the datacenter is in the middle of some industrial park, who would want to drive 30 minutes to an industrial park to have a swim?

The best waterparks in Tucson, AZ were on the outskirts of the city and worked great as a place to "travel" to for the parents as the kids would be wiped out on the way back. Breakers....Justins....how i miss those days of running around on hot pavement or gravel in bare feat only to also step on some cactus...

Hah yeah if you, as a parent, can survive a day at the water park in the sun then you’re all set for some quiet time when you get home. Waterparks zap kids and they pass out cold in the car as soon as the doors close. Same goes for the beach.

Re: Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

#78

Post by swiftcoder »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #13

Is it feasible to do this at smaller scales? Would be cool to use my compurers to heat water at home. Put all that useless heat to good use. Air conditioners could do it too, right? Pump heat into a water reservoir instead of just throwing it away?

> Is it feasible to do this at smaller scales?

You need a lot of heat to do anything useful. I would need to run something like 14 kW of servers to heat my home through winter - that's a couple of hundred thousand in hardware at current prices.

Re: Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

#79

Post by fghorow »

cyberax wrote: post #48
wffurr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not anywhere near hot enough to generate steam and make electricity. There are uses for low grade heat but they require colocation and careful design, which costs more than just dumping the heat.

It actually is, just not water steam. There's a hot springs resort in Alaska that uses pentane (boiling point 38C) to generate energy. The efficiency is terrible, of course.

True. Chena Hot Springs [1]. They are famous in the "direct use" geothermal community.

A lot of the thermal energy is not used for electrical generation. Although a small portion actually is -- made possible by the \Delta T rejecting heat at a low annual average atmospheric T.

Most of the rest of the heat is used to run an absorption chiller to maintain the ice "palace" in the summer.

(This info might be slightly outdated. It was true about 2018 or thereabouts when I met the owner of the resort at a geothermal conference.)

[1] https://www.chenahotsprings.com/>.

Re: Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

#80

Post by swiftcoder »

stavros wrote: post #8

I don't understand how a server (the "washing-machine-sized datacenter") can heat up any fraction of a swimming pool appreciably. Wouldn't it be a few kW tops?

You can fit, according to Nvidia, ~40 H100 GPUs in a 16U rack. That's 40 kW of power draw (and heat!) in roughly the space of a washing machine
Post reply on HN