The website looks much more professional than before, however it's lacking information. I'd like to see diagrams/explanations while getting straight to the point and avoiding obfuscation.

As I said before you should really forget about solar roadways and try to distance yourself because it's damaging your credibility. It is undeniably uneconomical to make solar roadways. It's been debunked by so many engineers at this point I'm surprised so many people are still latching on to the concept. If you guys can't figure out why solar roadways is unfeasible then I'm afraid your invention is doomed to fail for the same reasons they are. (hint: it's the cost)

Looking at the "henry-build-log" I am digging the watercooling setup however it looks pretty expensive. I'm guessing your whole cost is at least ~$500 for a ~500W system.

Let's do the math:

I pay ~$10/MBTU ($0.034/kwh) and ~$0.15/kwh.

0.5 kw * $0.034 * 24 * 365 = $148 (possible savings per year)

0.5 kw * $0.15 * 24 * 365 = $657 (cost of using electric heating instead of natural gas)

So you would need to find a computing application that pays at least $509 per year with only 500w worth of hardware before it becomes cheaper than natural gas heating for a maximum savings of only $148 per year.

If you do manage to find an application that pays out that well, then I'm sure it would make more sense to just set up a datacenter with cheaper electricity + more powerful/efficient servers.

Care to share your calculations?

Only in a perfect world where weather conditions never change throughout the year and people always use the same amount of heating/AC/hot water/refrigeration, this might work well.

**Wont share the calculations but I will give you a clue - the key is in the storage tanks.  


Where else would you publish it, the local newspaper? You guys came to this forum asking for feedback without giving us any idea of what your product does. We really shouldn't have to pry this info from you especially when you're weeks from launching a kickstarter.

**We came to see how people react to the idea, not to give them our business model.

What exactly is your business model? Will you be running a monetized distributed network? Selling the rube golberg machines by themselves? Selling hardware+rube golberg machine combos? Designing a chip? Installing/servicing entire home integrated systems?

Not sure how we're supposed to know/discuss your concept while you guys are providing as little information as possible.

**That is a problem but you are obviously smart and think about this stuff, I'm sure you will think of several viable business models if you let the concept sink in for a day or two.

So far here's what you've demonstrated:

- Using a computer creates heat which can then be sent through a watercooling loop to an insulated tank that can store the heat for a few hours and release it when heating is needed. (subtracted the rube golberg part)
- By spending several hundreds of dollars you can match the efficiency of a stock cpu fan+heatsink when it comes to heating your home using a computer.

**No, you removed a key and fundamental element of the system.

Here's what you need to demonstrate:

- You can store 190F water in a tank for hours without significant heat loss.
**I'll do you better - the next set of tanks will be filled with phase change material that actually holds significantly more energy than the water tanks we are using now.  Noodle on that for a bit.

- You can use 190F water from a computer to efficiently and cost effectively power a watertank/AC/refrigerator.
**Already done.  Wait - do you want to actually drink a computation cooled beer?  That can be arranged.

- You can efficiently power each of those appliances at the same time.
**We don't need to - think about energy storage... you'll get it.

- You can do so while maintaining a constant/efficient computing rate throughout the day/year.
**We don't need to.  If the energy source for the computation is free then I care a whole lot less about the efficiency of the computation.

- You can prove the costs are not more than regular gas/electric heating.
**Alright.  Computation produces the same amount of heat for the same energy as a resistance heater.  Computers are, after all, resistance heaters.  If you currently have a resistance heated anything we are 1-1 - if you don't the free computation more than pays for the delta in cost.

- You can give people an incentive to run their computers 24/7/365 (it's not like people are naturally using 1.5KW 24/7. More like ~200W a few hours a day)
**We don't want to run your computer, we'll want you to run our computer and we might be able to do that very inexpensively, from an energy perspective.

Until then you really have no business starting a crowdfunding campaign, but that's just my opinion.
**I don't remember asking for permission but perhaps the above answers have changed your mind?

**Whoa.  Is there a business model in there somewhere?

Have you really run out of experimenting funds in the theoretical stage?

Seems like a group of people with access to a national lab and fancy simulation software should have no problem buying an old used refrigerator and hooking it up to a water cooling loop to prove your theory.

I'd even be willing to bet you could have bought a used refrigerator or AC for less money than you wasted on those two hot water tanks.

**Interestingly the only reason to even plug a refrigerator into the thing it to demo for people, the math is done we've hit the temperature targets it'll work the moment its connected.  The hot water tanks are a necessity.  In order to test the performance of the system you have to have a load to run it against and the tanks do that perfectly.  We also have a pretty good approximation of the time we need to get that water from whatever point we want to start to whatever point we need to end while testing different strategies (like over/under clocking/volting) to performance test the system.  We can also draw heat off that load without thermally shocking the system - it acts a a buffer.  As you can imagine they system dosent like to go from 180 to ambient in one shot.


You've demonstrated that you can keep hot water in an insulated tank and heat the water using a computer but literally nobody thought that was impossible or hard to do.

** your obviously smarter than this...

You've really proven nothing new, especially none of the key concepts you're suggesting are practical.

**All the key concepts are practical, the only thing we've proven is we're not particularly good at explaining them... thanks for cluing us in, when you do this every day it all seems pretty obvious.

It's just like how solar roadways has "proven" you can recover electricity from solar panels on a road but in reality it makes absolutely no sense economically.

**I personally donated to solar roadways, not because it was practical but because it sends a message to manufacturers, developers and governments that this is the kind of change I want to see.  Whether you think it was a scam or not he made a trip to the White House (Bill Nye evidently likes him?) and is building the things at a scale previously not possible.  Interesting thing is he has already taken orders for several of the first systems proving we either don't understand the economic model or that he doesn't need one to sell the product.


How can you possibly begin raising funds without a clear business model?

**How can Solar Roadways sell their systems or raise grant money from the DOT without a clear economic model?  Saying you don't understand his model likely points to his inability to explain it well or our inability to understand it - it obviously says little about the product's viability since he is actually building and selling it!

Or is fleecing kickstarter tards the plan?

**We have a business model, it'll eventually be on the website and (like I said) we're not going to outline it on this forum.  Before we do that we'll obviously have to get a lot better at explaining how this thing works to people... although the business model is slightly easier.  Just because its easy to explain to engineers or people already working in the energy industry doesn't mean we can ignore everyone else.  I want to thank you for pointing that out, we'll use this good information to get our act together a little more before we do the kickstarter - I'll fully expect you to be there to debunk us!

Are you saying that currently only 55% of the heat stays in the loop when you want to use it for refrigeration/AC? 45% waste?

**No, I'm saying the current prototype is not very efficient at managing heat.   All the plumbing that moves the coolant is uninsulated and looses a fair amount of heat - the hotter it gets vs ambient the bigger the loss.  We're not investing in the first prototype anymore, its already proven the parts can manage the heat we need to make.


Correct, it will not be economic.

Here's a simplified comparison for 1MW worth of computing power:

A: Classic datacenter Capex: - hardware: $1,000,000 - Warehouse+infrastructure: $200,000 Opex(yearly): - Electricity: $570,000 (1.3MW at $0.05/kwh) - Employees:$100,000 5 Year total: $4,500,000

B: Distributed computing (using your method) Capex: - Hardware: $5,000,000* - Cooling recovery system: $5,000,000* (~$1/W at 5MW) - Distributing/shipping: $500,000 Opex: - Employees: $500,000** 5 year total: $13,000,000

<sup>*Assuming it would require 5 times the amount of hardware because it's being used 25% of the time due to none of your applications requiring 100% load 100% of the time and a 20% efficiency loss due to the hot chips. This is also assuming the system is 100% efficient at recovering the heat but your post suggest it might be closer to 50%.

**If sized correctly to the load it should run far more than the 20-30% utilization rate the typical datacenter sees.  There are about 120 different distributed computing networks out there now (a good Wiki search) and they are growing in number every day.  Bitcoin is a distributed computing network.  The idea idea is to compute whenever there is a need to generate heat, when the system is sized right that need can be pretty consistent.  Again - we would not continue to develop this design, it is just the first prototype.

**I've got no idea how many people it takes to properly run a distributed computing network but I'm sure it takes more than the 2 people needed top operate a large scale bitcoin mine. (guessing at least 10 employees)</sup>

** If memory serves Stanfords folding at home network is 250k distributed machines across the planet and everyone who donates their computer idle time is a part of that network.  They have a handful of techs that keep the software and their server running as well as spend time on the forums to answer questions and talk through bug fixes.  Not too many.

So basically you will have ~$9.3M extra startup costs so you can save ~$170k/year.. In this scenario it would take more than 50 years to pay off.

Overall cool idea, just entirely unpractical like solar roadways.

**Not the model - a valiant effort but, seriously, who would do that?  And... why would we publish the business model on a forum?

Side note: Do you plan on having certified technicians around the country ready to fix peoples heater/AC/refrigeration systems when they stop working? Will you be reimbursing customers for all their spoiled food when the computer crashes for a few hours?

**Nope - there are service models that don't require techs all around the world, at scale this will be more like an appliance, not a computer.  

No one is saying that absorption refrigeration is not possible.  When I was very young my parents lived off the electrical grid.  We had an old kerosene powered refrigerator which ran by burning kerosene.  It used absorptive refrigeration.  The refrigerator was replaced as soon as the far cheaper electricity became available.  

We are just saying it is extremely unlikely to be economic running off bitcoin miners.

With your proposed temperature difference of 50C or even 100F the efficiency will be 5 to 10%. The second law of thermodynamics sets an absolute limit to any heat engine.

Lets be really totally optimistic and assume  you are aiming for a 10% efficiency.  If you output 1,000W of heat from a miner you will get at the most 100W or useful work out and still have to get rid of at least 900 Watts of heat.  I just cannot see it even coming close to making economic sense.

Your web site says you have a "Lead Scientist" so I assume there has been some calculations done on expected energy output, on the overall economics, and on waste heat removal to maintain the 100f difference in temperature.

To repeat.  It is the efficiency and economics we question.  Not whether absorption refrigeration exists.

To improve your web site so it looks less like a scam site:

1) Redo your "team" page so it looks less like a teenage gamers attempt to be cool.

2) Sort out what distributed/grid computing has to do with anything.  One example from your web site (http://www.3xergy.com/wp/concept/)  

"The concept innovation proposed is an appliance that is designed to generate heat from a silent, self-contained computer processing unit which acts as a node(s) in a larger distributed grid computing network. The appliance will send a portion of the computational needs locally to common devices such as tablets, entertainment / gaming consoles, and personal computing, and a portion of computational needs globally as part of a distributed cloud computing network."  

What on earth does the above mean.  And why do you keep mentioning distributed/grid computing?

As a general comment the sentences on your web site are too long and convoluted.  You need to rewrite it to use simpler and clearer English.

3) Remove all those graphs that seem to have no purpose but to look impressive.  For example what does your device have to do with a graph showing the percentage of people in single dwelling houses.

4) Stop taking in this thread about "absorption cooling" and using "heat to create cold" as if the second law of thermodynamics does not apply to them.  The efficiency of extracting heat energy from a small temperature difference to drive refrigeration is extremely low, 5-10% with say a 50C difference.  It does not matter whether you are generating electricity or driving a refrigerator, the same laws of physics apply to the amount of energy you can extract from a temperature difference.

5) Make more realistic prototypes.  Don't have passive boxes with tubes that go out of the box and then immediately back in again.  At least describe in detail what the parts of the prototype are doing.  Otherwise it just looks like any water cooled PC.  Even better show the prototype actually doing something useful, making ice or steam or whatever.  A cup of coffee would be nice.


**Thanks for the feedback - its good stuff... except for #4.  We're talking about a minimum temperature difference today of > 100f to ambient which is more than enough to run a single or double effect absorber.  Remember, this thing is running at 180 to 200f right now (with off the shelf parts!), that's more than enough TD to regenerate desiccant or run an absorber.  The ideal range for the absorptive refrigerator is 180 - 200f, if you go above 230f it actually looses efficiency and starts to break down the refrigerant.  The plan is start building chips that hit 210 to 250f.

http://web.stanford.edu/group/narratives/classes/08-09/CEE215/ReferenceLibrary/Chillers/AbsorptionChillerGuideline.pdf
http://www.yazakienergy.com/waterfired.htm

You can't extract much energy from low-grade heat.  Maximum efficiency = (T2-T1)/T1, where T2 is the temperature of the low-grade heat (exhaust from the computer system), and T1 is the ambient temperature of where you dump the heat.  All temps are absolute (K).  Typical chip surface temps are 60-80C, and 70C is about 343K. If your cold end is a  cool day (say 15C), then T1 is 288K. The maximum energy you can recover from that heat is 19% of the input. That's a theoretical upper limit. Actual heat engines don't do that well.

Systems for absorption-Rankine low-grade heat recovery have been proposed.. At 120C in, 25C out, it might be possible to get 8% efficiency from a practical system. So yes, you can get some energy out, but it's barely worth it.

It is even worse than the above calculation.  The maximum energy that can be extracted between temperatures Thot and Tcold is (Thot - Tcold)/ Thot.  The above equation should be (T2-T1)/T2 rather than (T2-T1)/T1.

For the above example of 70C and 15C the maximum possible efficiency is 16% rather than 19%.  In reality the efficiency is likely to be between 5 and 10%.

Trying to extract any power from a small temperature difference is very inefficient.  Large power stations get better efficiency because the difference between high and low temperatures is around 500C, not 50C.  Power stations need the biggest possible temperature difference - that's why they need cooling water or cooling towers.  


In summary part of the confusion in this thread seems to be because there are 2 very different ways proposed in this thread, and on the 3xergy site, to use the heat.

1)  Simple use the heat as heat.  This is efficient. Simply use the heat from a miner to heat a room or heat water.  This seems to 'first generation' proposed at the www.3xergy.com site and appears to be nothing more than using a miner's excess heating to do space (or water) heating.  There is nothing new or unusual with this proposal.

2) The second way to use the heat is to use the small temperature difference between the miner and a cool point to extract power, for example to generate electricity or to power refrigeration.  As shown above this is very inefficient with small temperature differences.  Extracting power from the heat (temperature difference) and distributing excess heat via the electrical grid, as proposed on the www.3xergy.com site,  is extremely unlikely to be cost effective.  I won't call it a scam but it may be wishful thinking.  It can be done but is rarely worth the effort.  If you want more information see Carnot's principle or the second law of thermodynamics.    

They don't use heated water do they? I'm assuming there would need to be some modifications to the house/heating elements.

**Its really just adding a water jacket around the generator (where heat makes the chemicals react) and removing all of the propane/natural gas burners.  Its much les costly to heat them with the coolant than gas from a parts perspective so the units should be less expensive at scale.


That's the problem. 3-4 years is ~50-60 years in bitcoin time.

**Keep in mind the energy for performing computation was already just being used just for heat so performing the computation (from an energy perspective) is free.  That dramatically changes the economics.


Thinking about it from a non-bitcoin mining point of view I can actually see some use for your idea.

With bitcoin mining you need giant a warehouse in the middle of nowhere with dirt cheap electricity and maximum cooling. It would take a massive refrigerator to reuse 10+MW worth of heat.

**Consider the average Joe isn't going to the Arctic circle for free cooling and there isn't any cheap electricity to be had there at any rate.  We're talking about distributing that 10MW worth of heat (computing actually) to multiple average Joe's house.  This is a model where he could use the energy he would have used anyway where he is today to to create computation.  Like I mentioned, mining is only one potential revenue for the waste computation.  Even if you make a fraction of what you might with the latest rig, its still revenue.


I meant 90% of the energy used for heating is used for space heating. The graphs on your website would suggest about 60% of the energy used for heating is used for space heating in 2009. I'm sure the efficiency of absorption cooling has improved in the past 5 years and will continue to improve but heating technology will not so I think we will eventually see 90% being used for heating.

**if we have our way 90% of it will be used to do all those things at once, stacking the energy benefits on top of each other.  The concept behind Exergy is not saving energy, it is getting more work of the energy you are already using... its tricky to wrap the head around.



No problem. Another question for you:

How will you be heating water up to ~90C while keeping the asics/cpus/gpus cool? Water cooling normally has a ~10C dT between the water and the chip so if you need 90C water you will have a 100C chip. They are capable of working at that temp but depending on the design it will have an efficiency loss of ~0.25-1%/C.

So if you need to heat the water an extra 40C you could be using 40%-10% more power meaning you will need more hardware. The production costs of the most advanced bitcoin asics (starting from wafers) are ~$0.4/w so the costs are not insignificant. (although the costs are guaranteed to go down as process nodes shrink)

**We're more interested in keeping them hot, not cool.  Remember the benefit is derived by using these components as primary heaters and looking at the computation as a secondary benefit or 'waste stream' from the heat we need to produce anyway.  I think I mentioned in a post above that Moore's law will take care of some of the inefficiency - we're asking you to fundamentally change the way you think about computing.  Just like automobiles moved through their adoption cycle from the toys of the wealthy to Henry Fords car for the common man, computation is and will continue to become less expensive and more integrated into everything we do - we're saying lets jump start that (like Ford did) by building it into the most important things that consume the most raw energy.  Marrying the things we need to survive (heat/cold) to the things we need to thrive... massive scale, distributed computation.

We're actually boiling water with off the shelf parts today - how much heat do you think we can generate when we design our own chips that are meant to get hot?  Really hot?


How many of those companies building absorption refrigeration plants are using datacenters as a heat source?

**None.  They run them too cold to make the kind of heat you need to run building absorption refrigeration plants.  We aim to change their minds and show them a different way of thinking about heat and computation.

I know the technology is not new but it's not removing the cooling element. You will still need fans+heatsinks (or cooling towers, etc) to cool the water as well as electricity for the two water pumps required.

**We don't need a cooling tower, the heat is consumed in the work - heating water, making cold, etc.  Our idea is to not waste a single therm of heat if possible, its not getting pumped into the air as a waste stream - it is a primary heat stream.  Also, the 'new' parts of this technology actually address some of these very issues, like pumping specifically.

Thanks again - good thinking!  

Please do get into the thermodynamics. I'd love to know how you can cool something using nothing but heat. I'm sure there are also several multi-billion dollar companies wondering the same thing.

This is a scam in the same way solar roadways is a scam. It is a neat idea that doesn't make sense economically.

**Not really.  Its been reviewed by several PhDs - in fact our senior scientist has his doctorate.  There is a very sensible and viable business model to this, I'm sure you can come up with it if you spend a minute or two.


How much do you expect a modified refrigerator/air conditioner would cost/save? I really doubt you will recycle enough energy to justify the costs whatever they may be.  

**The refrigerators are mass produced today - every RV, most boats and many, many off grid homes already use absorptive refrigeration... it is safe, economical and completely silent.  When you take into account that your refrigerator is the device that runs the most in your house, you'll likely rethink that last statement.  

You might be able to save a few hundred dollars if you heated your water tank for a year using an asic, but your contraption cost would probably negate those savings. Not many people mine for more than a few months and those who do have very low electricity costs which makes recycling pointless.

**The energy you recovered alone would likely reimburse the cost of the system in under 3 years once they are in full production, remember you are using this energy already, we're just talking about using the same energy for two or more purposes - Heating/Cooling/Computation.  If you take into account Moore's law we'll very likely have good reason to replace the units every 3-4 years, as computing gets smaller and more efficient we can pack more and more of it into the same appliance.  I'm really not interested in heating water with ASIC - there is a much more robust business model in selling distributed computation that doesn't rely on a race to the bottom from a technology perspective.

The real savings would come from space heating but you don't need a rube goldberg machine for that.

**The savings can come from far more than space heating - take a look at the website and think about the energy balance of the house.  We will eventually address more than 70% of the load in the average house through space heating, water heating, air conditioning and refrigeration.  You don't have to be rube goldberg to see that.


Ignoring the fact that most modern datacenters use ~10-30% for cooling and that converting all their air cooled hardware to water cooled would cost an obscene amount of money, how do you plan on moving several hundred KW worth of heat from a datacenter to a place that needs it?

**Lets not ignore the fact that 'modern datacenters' make a very, very small portion of the overall population of datacenters which have been around since the 90s at scale.  The vast majority of datacenters are embedded in office buildings and rely on the HVAC system or CRAC units for cooling... you can bet they are not using 10-30% total energy for cooling.

I don't doubt it can be done but I really doubt it can be done cost effectively.

**That's our job to figure out, not yours.



The question is what portion? Have you done calculations on how much electricity you might be able to recycle? I'd love to see a cost/savings breakdown.

**We have - think along the lines of 70%  to start with and then think about how many of the appliances that make up the remaining 30% could be completely obviated if you actually had a house with a super computer built into its core.  We're not there... but we will get there.


But if 90% of that energy is spent on space heating, why not use a $25 heatsink+fan instead of a $300 rube goldberg machine and another ~$1000 for a modified AC+refrigerator?

**Only 40% at best is used for space heating with another 18% used for water heat.  Of course we'll start there, its the easiest and most cost effective loads to get to in a house!  But, if you are going to purpose build a house around a super computer why exactly wouldn't you install the $1000 refrigerator or the $2000 air conditioner?  Remember, the more you use these computation powered devices the more computation that has to be done in order to create the heat... if we are selling the computation to Cloud Services Aggregators & Brokerages then that makes everyone happy.

Basically you can recycle ~$2700 without modifying your hardware by space heating, or you can spend an extra ~$300 to save $3000(~$300 extra) by incorporating water heating.

If you can do that we have some friends at NREL who would love to have a talk with you.  Remember, computers aren't designed to run hot they are built to be run as cool as practicable (dont worry, NREL couldn't get their heads wrapped around the concept at first and they are ALL engineers and PhDs) and today's computers certainly aren't optimized to get to the 180-200f that we need to do refrigeration or air conditioning. 

Thanks much for the good questions, we need to get prepped for these conversations as we start to roll out the prototypes.

For one, everything you and your website says is worded like a scam.

For two, this is the most absurd idea I've heard in my life.

This is a rube goldberg machine disguised as a futuristic innovative cooling/heating thingy.

Subtracting all the bullshit and obfuscation this is how I understand your contraption: A watercooling loop delivers heated water to an insulated tank which then goes through a radiator to heat the air when you need it.

What happens when the tank is full of hot water and the cpu needs cool water? Will it shut off the cpu? underclock? heat the room when it's is already heated?

Why would anyone buy this contraption for presumably hundreds of dollars when a $20 cpu+fan does essentially the same thing?

I think that would be a challenge as you need to put cooling heatsinks/tubing on the asic chips -> water heater.

I don't get it. Why would anybody in their right mind want to heat a building using the waste heat from electrical devices when it's far more energy efficient to just use a heat pump?