Should we Recycle Server Room Heat?

May 22, 2009 by
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, General 
Let go Green

Over the weekend, I was watching System, which is one of my favorite shows on Revision3 .com. One of the questions was on how to use the excess heat generated by computers to heat a room. I am a big supporter of  the “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle”  philosophy, and thought that was a great idea.

After some hard and heavy Google’n, I was excited to  find out other ways people have used this wasted server room energy.  The story of a  Mid-Western college  saving their greenhouse caught my eye.

“The University of Notre Dame’s high-performance computing (HPC) department has taken things a step further. It now reuses the heat generated by its servers to warm up a historic greenhouse that the city of South Bend, Ind., has threatened to shut down.”

By using the heat from the server they are saving the university $100,000 on cooling costs and the owner of the botanical garden, the City of South Bend, Indiana, another $70,000 on heating costs. It’s win-win for everyone.

Now I am trying to figure out ways to implement this type of thinking here at work and at home. I think that my first step would be to add another temperature probe to the back of the server rack. This should give me the data that I need.

Maybe I can use the excess heat to warm up my cube. I’ll update you with what I find out.

Related posts:

  1. Simple Ways To Make Your Server Room Green
  2. My Ravica sensorProbe woke me up! Time for some coffee.
  3. 5 tips for an energy-efficient data center

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Comments

  • http://www.kellsystems.com David O’Coimin

    Hey Jimmy. You guys should consider putting your gear into a Kell PSE (Portable Server Environment). We’re working hard to get the world to understand that you don’t need to build Server Rooms anymore. The heat from the equipment can be used in winter to reduce your heating bill (on top of having already removed the cost to cool your server room). Makes too much sense to ignore, right?

  • http://www.ravica.com/blog/data-center/sever-room-environment-moderated-by-mother-nature/ Server Room Environment Moderated by Mother Nature : Ravica Blog

    [...] I wrote a while back that talked about recycling expelled heat from the server room and using it to heat the office.   The Life Hacker blog post demonstrated a method of cooling an over-clocked PC with fresh air [...]

  • http://slashnext.com/2011/07/heating-up-with-cloud-computing/ Heating Up with Cloud Computing | slashnext

    [...] and this bring back my memories.  About article i read few years ago. It was blog post about recycling server room heat. One of the questions was on how to use the excess heat generated by computers to heat a room. I am [...]