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[–] 7 points 1 year ago (8 children)

My server is a loose motherboard with a loose PSU, thrown into the living room TV rack, which I leave open for cooling. It's a repurposed (free) Athlon, DDR2. I only use it for smb and git backups, and project sharing between my desktop and laptop. What amazes me most is my IT coworkers don't find that a perfectly acceptable scenario.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    That free computer is going to cost you a lot on your electric bill.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Even in winter, it's terrible compared to a heat pump or (probably) directly burning gas or wood.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Not how heat works.

    If you're trying to heat your home, every electronic device becomes 100% efficient. All its "waste" heat becomes wanted heat. That it might only be 40W of heat is not the point.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    Every electronic device is 100% efficient after the electricity has already been generated and delivered, sure, but a bunch of efficiency losses occurred before that. If you're comparing methane burned on-site in a furnace to methane burned at a power plant, transmitted to the site as electricity, and then used for electric resistance heating, burning on-site is gonna be better even if the furnace loses more heat up the chimney than the power plant does.

    Also, a heat pump is "300%-500% efficient" in the sense that it moves 3x-5x as much heat as it uses. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance

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  • Heat pumps can actually be over 100% efficient if you’re measuring it based on heat produced. Because heat pumps aren’t designed to produce heat; They’re designed to move it around via refrigerant. And if you can use 1w of energy to soak up and bring in 3w of heat, you’re now 300% efficient.

    So by that metric, a server would be a “bad” heater. It would still contribute to your heating, but not as much as a heat pump would. It doesn’t mean the device is below 100% efficient, it just means the bar for “good” heaters is much higher than 100%.

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