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Is there any way to store surplus waste heat for redistribution months later? The only thing I can think of is just a really large, high heat capacity mass surrounded by incredible insulation material, with a heat pump system built in to it. Which would be incredibly impractical.
Look into geothermal heat pumps. During the summer they pump heat from your house underground, and during the winter they pump it back in.
But the energy doesn't really stay there. The thermal mass and temperature of the ground just means that you can always efficiently take heat from it or effectively dump heat into it. Always predictably the same efficiency.
If the heat was actually stored, the start of summer and winner the pump would be super efficient, but by the end it'd be inefficient working hard to move the heat. So it seems kinda wasteful that the energy isn't being stored, but it's actually kinda better that it isn't.
I have actually gotten up to run benchmarks on my PC on particularly cold nights.
For the heat and electricity, it's stunning how much compute I get from my somewhat modern gear vs. my 40U rack of 10-years ago.
my gaming PC literally is a primary heat source in my cold office.
Gaming PCs are about to top out at 1500W, which is a very solid space heater. Honestly, it complements a heat pump just fine. If you can set up a fan pushing air out of your gaming den and/or home server room you're at least starting to justify your stupidly wasteful setup.
I have to be honest, all the PC master race bros are deep into the awkward monkey puppet meme hoping all the AI haters don't realize they're using hardware that can easily run very competent genAI at competitive speeds to play CounterStrike. If you want to make and post that one you have my blessing.
That's why I like my mini PC with a laptop GPU. Its not the most powerful, but it can play most stuff at 1080p Very High settings and get 60 FPS all while using 300ish watts. Good enough for me. I really don't want to deal with noise, size and power consumption of a kitted out gaming rig anymore.
This conversation is two steps away from rediscovering the concept of consoles and I'm here for it.
My homelab is in the same space as my furnace so the ambient heat in that space is preheating my ducts. In the summer when the AC runs the cold air leaking into the space helps cool my homelab. In my garage office my desktop with 9 spinning drives and 3070 really keeps the space comfortable.
People used to mine Bitcointhis was. Only in winter.
My server only draws like 300watts max, not a very good heater
Put a 4090 in there and pump those numbers up!
Been done years ago and failed miserably: Nerdalize
Maybe a failure at a commercial level, but ~~people~~ tech nerds are still heating their homes in the winter with crypto miners
I have thought of this exact thing and thought I was the only one.
I got a laptop for work, using it at home and I want to use my computer because if I just use my laptop its cold. When my pc runs the rooms is nice and toasty.
Electric heaters literally cost 25 bucks
psychosomatic. Heaters are expensive to run, but if I'm just running my pc, I "Have to" be running that so it doesn't feel more expensive. I have heaters I just keep not turning them on until its too cold.
Just like me playing City Skylines 2 on a cold morning
