I love my gaming PC and 3d printer in the winter. Keeps my room toasty without me needing to run the heat much at all.

I hate those same things in the summer when I gotta have fans or AC just so I don't melt lol

My server rack (in the cold garage) is now enclosed and the air filtered and piped into my grow tent which then regulates with cold air from the garage.

I saw an interesting post that said

All electronics are 100% efficient in the winter

Back in high school, my buddy used to VNC into his Athlon 3200+ WinXP machine from school and start SuperPi calculating a million digits. Took 40minutes and got his room proper toasty by time he got home.

Here me out: a global computing cooperative –
Collectively owned servers and gaming PCs are run at max power wherever it's winter at the time, streaming the data to where it is needed.

Electricity generated heat from your servers is incredibly inefficient compared to a heat pump.

My home server was serving a dual purpose of keeping my closet full of 3d printer filament dry, but then the most recent TrueNAS Scale updates killed it by dropping my average CPU load from 10 to 4%.

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.

Yeah, I've been saying we should make crypto mining space heaters. I don't think there's much of a market for it, but it's an interesting thought. Worst case, it would be an amazing gag gift.

Or, if you believe all crypto is immoral (arguably fair), then make a space heater that runs something like folding at home.

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.

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.

I have actually gotten up to run benchmarks on my PC on particularly cold nights.

Sadly, for a few years now I've had TDP as one of the main criteria when buying parts for my machines, so there really isn't enough waste heat from my machines to even just keep a room warm in Winter by playing heavy 3D games (the worst machine tops at around 180W with 3D and CPU heavy games - so basically the same heating as a really bright incandescent light bulb - whilst my home server uses about 20W at 100%)

On the other hand what I save in power consumption on my machines can be used on a dedicated heating solution that's ON only when I need it rather than the whole year.