eRadiator: Heat Your Home For Free (Almost) With The Cloud

It seems there have been a lot of breakthroughs in the energy field recently: the city of Portland, Oregon has begun installing  turbines to scavenge electricity from existing water supply pipes, IBM has improved solar technology by leaps and bounds and Japanese scientists have figured out a way to resume Tesla’s research on wireless power transmission.

Everywhere you look people are trying to come up with better ways and new technologies to lessen the strain on our fragile planet. It’s a wonderful thing to watch it unfold while secretly hoping it snowballs into some sort of sustainable utopian energy collective.

Thanks to a broken thermostat, a laptop and a joke, we now have the ‘eRadiator’ out in the world, proving itself for the first time.  The technology behind it is the brainchild of a Dutch startup company, “Nerdalize.” The idea was developed after the founders wound up huddling near a laptop to keep warm when their heater stopped working. After jokingly suggesting buying 100 laptops, the light bulb went on and the idea was born.

Anyone that owns, or even just uses, a computer, tablet or any other tech device knows two things… it needs power and it creates heat. The more it’s used, the more heat you get from it. It’s not tough to understand but it can be hard to deal with. The eRadiator is a server designed to be installed anywhere, from a business to a private home. It is a completely self-contained unit, cooling systems and all.

To some this may not seem like a big deal, but when you think of all the variables involved with a data center, it’s a simplistic case of genius. For those that are not familiar with anything other than a home computer, here’s the short version: imagine a dictionary — not an online version, an actual book — now imagine that the dictionary itself is the server and each word inside of it is a computer. The bigger the server, the more it can handle. Now imagine a room with 100 servers, or 200… or more. Servers use power to do their jobs and these machines create heat, and so, more power is used to remove that heat. Sometimes even more power is used to supply air conditioning to the room to keep things cool. What may very well cost $2 to use, now costs $5 just to maintain it.

The eRadiator is designed to be installed in an ordinary home or business. It uses a certain amount of power to perform its functions just as any server does. As it works and builds heat, the radiator portion of unit heats the room instead of pushing it out to the atmosphere or attempting to overcome it with air conditioning. The energy used to operate the server is now performing two tasks and does not require extra systems just to do it’s job. What costs $2 may now only cost one dollar. You can check out Eneco’s “how it works” here.

Besides the benefits to private homeowners, a study carried out, in cooperation with the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computing Science, shows that entities that require a lot of processing power can reduce their operating costs of data centers by 30% to 55%. Saving money with the bonus of having more floor space within the confines of their facility is a definite plus. Let’s hope the field testing proves that the system is a viable one.

SOURCES:

(2015, March 24). Test trial to use computer servers to heat homes

Marcel, V. D. (2015, March 24). Heat your home for free with heating provided by a computer server

Using servers to heat homes. (2015, March 24)

Citation

(2015)

(Marcel, 2015)

(‘Using servers to heat homes’, 2015)

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