I want to let you all know about what I think is one of the coolest yet most under-appreciated ways to reduce waste and improve one’s impact on the world.
A bit of background first: Every watt of electricity you use in your house turns into heat. A blender is just as efficient at turning electricity into heat as a space heater. It sounds counter-intuitive, but ask your grade school physics teacher and you’ll find that the conservation of energy is not a controversial topic in physics. If you have electric heat such as electric baseboards or space heaters (NOT heat pumps since they are >100% efficient), you can heat your house with computers and spend the exact same amount as your normal heat bill but also get some useful computational work done in the process. If you are spending 50W on a space heater, you could instead dump that 50W into your computer. You pay for and get 50W of heat either way, but only the computer does some work along the way.
So really, if you are pouring electricity into a space heater or electric baseboard heater, it’s a waste, because that same electricity could be doing some useful work.
What kind of work? Well, I donate my computer’s time to BOINC. BOINC lemmy at !boinc@sopuli.xyz . (The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a free and open-source program that has been around for decades and has delivered teraflops of computing to scientists on a daily basis for absolutely free. It runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, even Android (just be careful about heat on Android!). You don’t need to be computer-savvy to run it.
BOINC has been used to map the universe, detect asteroids, search for aliens (remember seti@home?), fight cancer, and publish hundreds of scientific papers. The world’s largest particle accelerator (large hadron collider at CERN) even has a project you can compute for, who knows, you may find a new subatomic particle! Anybody with a computer, raspberry pi, or android can contribute their CPU or GPU to the cause and pick which projects they want to contribute to.
One of the awesome things about BOINC is that any scientists with interesting research can instantly access massive amounts of computational power for free. They don’t need time on a supercomputer or institutional backing, all they need is an interesting research concept and a spare laptop to run the server on.
I have been running BOINC for many years and find it very gratifying, I love getting to see the results. In winter, 100% of my indoor heat comes from computing for science.
Yep absolutely. If you consider the cost of electricity a “sunken cost” regardless, you can mine crypto and always turn a profit though your total monthly revenue might be on the order of dollars a month even with heating an entire apartment. Many crypto miners utilize waste heat in some fashion or another. They also tend to flock to places with the cheapest electricity, which tends to be over-provisioned renewables which are needed to balance the totally imbalanced demand curves which every power grid is subject to. If you want to run your grid on 100% renewables, that means that your average production must exceed your peak demand. Which also means during non-peak demand, you now are producing more energy than you need, since supply and demand must be constantly balanced on a minute-by-minute basis to prevent grid failure, this means at times the electric rate may actually go negative as the power companies need somebody to soak up the extra supply since turning on/off production has some costs and delays associated with it. Bitcoin mining takes up around .1% of global energy usage, mostly from renewable sources.
Personally, I’d rather donate my computational power to science. But there are cryptos which will reward you for scientific computation so you can have it both ways. !gridcoin@lemmy.ml rewards BOINC and Folding@home for example, they have been doing that for around ten years. Basically, they asked the question “What if instead of minting coins for people calculating hashes, we did it for people calculating science?”. There’s no separate proof-of-work element so all the energy still goes to science. I collect GRC rewards because it helps a bit with the electric bill but it’s not like it makes me any real money.
I find it bizarre that places have resistive electrical heating. Like how in this day and age do you have resistive heating instead of a furnace or a newfangled heat pump.
It is nice if you live in a small town or the middle of nowhere to have resistive heating. There aren’t any gas lines running out there to provide your home with a constant stream of gas, so if you want a gas powered solution, you end up having to have a pig (it’s this gas tank thing) outside your home, and you have to pay to have LP trucked out to fill it up many times a winter, and if you forget to check the pig and run out of gas, your family gets cold, and then you have to pay extra to get the truck to come quickly.
Meanwhile resistive heating uses the power lines that are run pretty much everywhere, and you pay monthly with your power bill, instead of incurring a larger charge for a longer period of time all at once.
But also, and I don’t know if this is true or not, so don’t quote me, heat pumps don’t work if it is too cold outside, and a lot of the time when it is winter, it is very cold outside.
Basically, resistive heating has its place. As for running calculations to create heat, I’m not sure if that’s effective on its own, I feel like you’d need a space heater or two to kickstart your way to having a warm home if the temperature changes suddenly, but apart from that the idea seems pretty sound.
If you’re at the temp a heat pump won’t work, resistive heating will likely be tens of thousands a year. A furnace will be more economical.
If you’re somewhere warmer, then a heat pump will be more economical than resistive heating.
The only economical or useful thing about resistive heating is the installation price. But use it for a handful of years and heat pump (even from decades ago) will be better.
We’ve been using a woostove heatpump combo so even it dips below -30 we just warm the house off wood and run the heat pump the rest of the time, I would love setting up a way to use the chimney to exhaust help the heatpump run better in the cold
No. I have a several room apartment split into several “zones” for heating purposes and the heat moves around enough without needing to manually move the air. In deep winter I basically have everything with a plug I can get my hands on plugged into the wall. During more milder parts, I’ll turn on/off stuff as I leave rooms and I have all the machines tied to a thermostat script so they never run if the room gets too warm. The house’s native heat is just electric baseboard heaters. With the layout of my apartment they are actually kind of a pain as you can’t put anything near them for fire hazard reasons, so almost all of them are turned off permanently so I don’t have to worry about that.
A pretty random mix of desktop PCs w/ GPUs, SBCs, androids, and some laptops. The androids I leave on even in summer, they sip electricity and are crazy efficient in terms of computation per watt. Some motherboards are just running out in the open with no case because why not. Lots is hardware I’ve picked up for free from people who didn’t want it anymore. Some of it has problems or is quite old but works for the purposes of generating heat and doing science. I’ve played around w some servers but the noise is just not something that can be worked around especially for the 1U ones. I really want to set up a fish tank full of mineral oil one year and dunk a bunch of my equipment into there and experiment with that, I’ve seen some really interesting stats on efficiency gains doing that.
Honestly I have no idea about the insulation grade, seems pretty good compared to previous places I’ve lived. Fairly moderate climate, but it below freezing here for a good couple months. I turn off my rigs once it warms up though my main computer crunches BOINC year round as it has to be on most of the time anyways.
I should probably also add that many of my rigs are underclocked to some degree. Absolutely not a thing you have to do, they are 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat either way, but most CPUs and GPUs actually hit their peak computation-per-watt efficiency somewhere between 60-80% of maximum clock speed. I’ve never messed around with undervolting but I know some people do.
Yep, I even wrote a script to do that. But if your thermostat consistently turns on throughout the day and night, as long as that continues to happen, your computer is not adding more heat than the thermostat would have, the thermostat just has to add 100W less of heat or whatever your computer draws.
Most thermostats just turn on/off, they don’t have a concept of “regular” vs “full blast” because furnaces and other heating appliance don’t, they’re also just on or off. So when heat needs to be added, they turn on, and once there’s enough heat, they turn off. If you run your computer for a bit, they’ll just wait a few more seconds to minutes before turning on again since there’s less of a difference to make up.
Not really. Computers don’t have a linear failure rate due to wear like for example a belt in your car would. Their failure is more or less random (or bathtub shaped if you want to plot it on a graph). Silicon and motherboards are incredibly durable. Go to any electronics recycling facility and you’ll find boards which have been around for 10+ years and still work fine but are no longer relevant. What you won’t find are many functional hard drives etc manufactured the same year.
As long as you don’t have a ton of dust built up, every other component (your HDD, your OS, the laptops hinges, the power supply, etc) in your computer will fail before the silicon (on average) and the device will become obsolete before the silicon fails. No guarantee it happens that way, but on average this is how it tends to go. And whether you ran them at 50% or 100% doesn’t matter because the causes of their failure aren’t really related to load but due to, for example, your OS getting slower over time or infected with malware, gradual overvolting/undervolting over time due to electricity not being 100% “pristine” all the time, etc. There are many people in the BOINC community who have been crunching on the same rigs 100% full throttle for a decade with no issues.
Really the category where lifespan would start to be effected are laptops and androids which really do not have sufficient heat exhaustion to run 100% even for a few minutes and where battery lifespan decreases significantly even for “medium” amounts of heat. For laptops, you can safely run them at around 50% usage (and your efficiency in terms of computation per watt tops out at around 80% anyways though it’s always 100% efficient at generating heat). For Androids, I wouldn’t suggest running BOINC on them unless you can remove the cover and directly expose the hot parts to air.
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Being “zero waste” means that we adopt steps towards reducing personal waste and minimizing our environmental impact.
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You could mine bitcoins too.
Yep absolutely. If you consider the cost of electricity a “sunken cost” regardless, you can mine crypto and always turn a profit though your total monthly revenue might be on the order of dollars a month even with heating an entire apartment. Many crypto miners utilize waste heat in some fashion or another. They also tend to flock to places with the cheapest electricity, which tends to be over-provisioned renewables which are needed to balance the totally imbalanced demand curves which every power grid is subject to. If you want to run your grid on 100% renewables, that means that your average production must exceed your peak demand. Which also means during non-peak demand, you now are producing more energy than you need, since supply and demand must be constantly balanced on a minute-by-minute basis to prevent grid failure, this means at times the electric rate may actually go negative as the power companies need somebody to soak up the extra supply since turning on/off production has some costs and delays associated with it. Bitcoin mining takes up around .1% of global energy usage, mostly from renewable sources.
Personally, I’d rather donate my computational power to science. But there are cryptos which will reward you for scientific computation so you can have it both ways. !gridcoin@lemmy.ml rewards BOINC and Folding@home for example, they have been doing that for around ten years. Basically, they asked the question “What if instead of minting coins for people calculating hashes, we did it for people calculating science?”. There’s no separate proof-of-work element so all the energy still goes to science. I collect GRC rewards because it helps a bit with the electric bill but it’s not like it makes me any real money.
I find it bizarre that places have resistive electrical heating. Like how in this day and age do you have resistive heating instead of a furnace or a newfangled heat pump.
Very common in my area idk why.
Which area is that?
It is nice if you live in a small town or the middle of nowhere to have resistive heating. There aren’t any gas lines running out there to provide your home with a constant stream of gas, so if you want a gas powered solution, you end up having to have a pig (it’s this gas tank thing) outside your home, and you have to pay to have LP trucked out to fill it up many times a winter, and if you forget to check the pig and run out of gas, your family gets cold, and then you have to pay extra to get the truck to come quickly.
Meanwhile resistive heating uses the power lines that are run pretty much everywhere, and you pay monthly with your power bill, instead of incurring a larger charge for a longer period of time all at once.
But also, and I don’t know if this is true or not, so don’t quote me, heat pumps don’t work if it is too cold outside, and a lot of the time when it is winter, it is very cold outside.
Basically, resistive heating has its place. As for running calculations to create heat, I’m not sure if that’s effective on its own, I feel like you’d need a space heater or two to kickstart your way to having a warm home if the temperature changes suddenly, but apart from that the idea seems pretty sound.
Proper heat pumps work well inncold weather. The issue is that the drain and the outdoor unit can freeze up if not built for the climate.
Source: am Norwegian. Had a heat pump in my previous house.
If you’re at the temp a heat pump won’t work, resistive heating will likely be tens of thousands a year. A furnace will be more economical.
If you’re somewhere warmer, then a heat pump will be more economical than resistive heating.
The only economical or useful thing about resistive heating is the installation price. But use it for a handful of years and heat pump (even from decades ago) will be better.
We’ve been using a woostove heatpump combo so even it dips below -30 we just warm the house off wood and run the heat pump the rest of the time, I would love setting up a way to use the chimney to exhaust help the heatpump run better in the cold
Any details on your setup?
Thanks!
But can you atta attach a thermostat to your computer so it only works hard when your house is below a certain temperature?
Yep, I even wrote a script to do that. But if your thermostat consistently turns on throughout the day and night, as long as that continues to happen, your computer is not adding more heat than the thermostat would have, the thermostat just has to add 100W less of heat or whatever your computer draws.
Most thermostats just turn on/off, they don’t have a concept of “regular” vs “full blast” because furnaces and other heating appliance don’t, they’re also just on or off. So when heat needs to be added, they turn on, and once there’s enough heat, they turn off. If you run your computer for a bit, they’ll just wait a few more seconds to minutes before turning on again since there’s less of a difference to make up.
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Not really. Computers don’t have a linear failure rate due to wear like for example a belt in your car would. Their failure is more or less random (or bathtub shaped if you want to plot it on a graph). Silicon and motherboards are incredibly durable. Go to any electronics recycling facility and you’ll find boards which have been around for 10+ years and still work fine but are no longer relevant. What you won’t find are many functional hard drives etc manufactured the same year.
As long as you don’t have a ton of dust built up, every other component (your HDD, your OS, the laptops hinges, the power supply, etc) in your computer will fail before the silicon (on average) and the device will become obsolete before the silicon fails. No guarantee it happens that way, but on average this is how it tends to go. And whether you ran them at 50% or 100% doesn’t matter because the causes of their failure aren’t really related to load but due to, for example, your OS getting slower over time or infected with malware, gradual overvolting/undervolting over time due to electricity not being 100% “pristine” all the time, etc. There are many people in the BOINC community who have been crunching on the same rigs 100% full throttle for a decade with no issues.
Really the category where lifespan would start to be effected are laptops and androids which really do not have sufficient heat exhaustion to run 100% even for a few minutes and where battery lifespan decreases significantly even for “medium” amounts of heat. For laptops, you can safely run them at around 50% usage (and your efficiency in terms of computation per watt tops out at around 80% anyways though it’s always 100% efficient at generating heat). For Androids, I wouldn’t suggest running BOINC on them unless you can remove the cover and directly expose the hot parts to air.
For stuff like this you can get used equipment. Or put new ones together from junked PCs.
you must live somewhere that is very mild in the winter and/or have very thick insulation.