We'd love board feedback on our concept: Combined Heating and Computation

[adesanctis]

Hello Bitcoin/Crypto Currency world!
 
First time listener, first time caller...first....timer.  

I'll be as brief as possible. I am a part of a team that has developed a prototype machine that essentially captures, stores, and when necessary, distributes the waste heat generated from high capacity computing. The prototype and the concept is mostly being pushed out over Energy Efficiency related networks. The idea is that the computational load across a larger distributed network essentially becomes the "fuel" to keep the components hot and transferring heat. There's also local computational demand, so theoretically, the device could control anything in your house with a CPU or GPU. Globally, the collective computational power could be tapped by you, or third parties for whatever it's needed for - advanced math, research, whatever.
 
Although we have some members of our team that are mining and active in the crypto currency space, we thought it was time to start engaging the Bitcoin community and the crypto currency community at large as well.
 
In a nutshell, the system is a node in a larger distributed network that is sending high capacity computation back out to the grid for others (maybe you?) to use. In putting that data out to the grid (presumably to similar type machines) the waste heat is locally captured and directed accordingly.
 
While there are a ton of applications for that extra computing power, your community seems to have the greatest immediate use and quite frankly, the most available source of expertise.
 
In the coming weeks, we'll be starting a KS campaign to raise money for R&D. Ideally, we'd actually like to crowd source a lot of the R&D particularly as we develop the distributed networking capacity. There is R&D related to materials as well, but that's wet lab based and will address different issues.
 
www.3xergy.com (pronounced Exergy)
 
Would love your comments, comments and feed back in this thread, but please feel free to reach out directly via the website's contact form.

 
Thank you for your time.

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[philipma1957]

okay I see the idea. have a bunch of miners cooled by a liquid cooling system.

once a radiator  of coolant reaches a certain temp. it pumps that hot liquid into a thermos. then the heated liquid is used to run a electrical power source.

you use the setup to save on power costs. Has potential but it needs to be fully developed now. Mining is being taken over by large companies in countries like China power subsidies are  already in place.

[adesanctis]

In it's simplest form, yes. Pretty much. The difference being the thermal energy is stored and available for use on demand. Goodbye furnace, AC unit, etc.

There could be some cool applications for gamers as well.

[adesanctis]

We are in a very early R&D phase. Submit a contact form and I'll get you on the list to be notified when the Kickstarter sets off.

[Nagle]

We are in a very early R&D phase. Submit a contact form and I'll get you on the list to be notified when the Kickstarter sets off.

This is a dumb idea. Don't send them money. Home Bitcoin mining is dead, killed by increasing difficulty.

It's not even a new dumb idea.  Over 30 years ago, there was the Frenette Friction Furnace, an electric motor driving a brake. This is just the Internet-enabled version of an old scam.

[adesanctis]

This....is nothing like what we are doing.

Did you visit our site? Or are you knee jerking it?

[jimmothy]

This....is nothing like what we are doing.

Did you visit our site? Or are you knee jerking it?

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?

[adesanctis]

This....is nothing like what we are doing.

Did you visit our site? Or are you knee jerking it?

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?

Woooooow. I can feel your affection. ... The love is swelling in you now.

For one: Scams usually ask for stuff ($ mainly). We don't. We're just looking to talk with people. If an investor comes along, we'll talk to them too (we are). So let's settle down on that. If you are someone who doesn't want to give your money, rest assured, we don't want it.

For two: thanks for the feedback. It's why I'm here.

It's a proof of concept: not a product ready for sale, distribution, etc. The question really isn't where do you get more cold water - it's how do make sure the material components heating the water through heat exchange can handle that type of long term stress AND make the thing work over a larger distributed network so when the demand for heat is there, there is data to fire up the components to provide heat.

The concept also has really strong applications with datacenters, but I think that's a different discussion.

I actually have some good build pics and screen grabs of testing....but I'm at a loss as to how to post pics on here. Lil help? Anyone?

[jimmothy]

For one: Scams usually ask for stuff ($ mainly). We don't. We're just looking to talk with people. If an investor comes along, we'll talk to them too (we are). So let's settle down on that. If you are someone who doesn't want to give your money, rest assured, we don't want it.

In the coming weeks, we'll be starting a KS campaign to raise money for R&D. Ideally, we'd actually like to crowd source a lot of the R&D particularly as we develop the distributed networking capacity.

Wise of you to go with kickstarter. This is exactly the type of scam they eat up.

For two: thanks for the feedback. It's why I'm here.

It's a proof of concept: not a product ready for sale, distribution, etc. The question really isn't where do you get more cold water - it's how do make sure the material components heating the water through heat exchange can handle that type of long term stress AND make the thing work over a larger distributed network so when the demand for heat is there, there is data to fire up the components to provide heat.

I'm not sure what concept you are proving or even what you are trying to say. Seems like you're just circumventing the question.

Watercooling is a widely proven technology. You've just added a water tank that stores the hot water and cools it later.

Why not just heat the air by computing when you need heating instead of when you don't? (via a $20 heatsink+fan combo)

Honestly what's the point?

The concept also has really strong applications with datacenters, but I think that's a different discussion.

Please do share. Preferably without the obfuscation.

I actually have some good build pics and screen grabs of testing....but I'm at a loss as to how to post pics on here. Lil help? Anyone?

Code:

[img]imageurl.jpg[/img]

[adesanctis]

For one: Scams usually ask for stuff ($ mainly). We don't. We're just looking to talk with people. If an investor comes along, we'll talk to them too (we are). So let's settle down on that. If you are someone who doesn't want to give your money, rest assured, we don't want it.

In the coming weeks, we'll be starting a KS campaign to raise money for R&D. Ideally, we'd actually like to crowd source a lot of the R&D particularly as we develop the distributed networking capacity.

Wise of you to go with kickstarter. This is exactly the type of scam they eat up.

For two: thanks for the feedback. It's why I'm here.

It's a proof of concept: not a product ready for sale, distribution, etc. The question really isn't where do you get more cold water - it's how do make sure the material components heating the water through heat exchange can handle that type of long term stress AND make the thing work over a larger distributed network so when the demand for heat is there, there is data to fire up the components to provide heat.

I'm not sure what concept you are proving or even what you are trying to say. Seems like you're just circumventing the question.

Watercooling is a widely proven technology. You've just added a water tank that stores the hot water and cools it later.

Why not just heat the air by computing when you need heating instead of when you don't? (via a $20 heatsink+fan combo)

Honestly what's the point?

The concept also has really strong applications with datacenters, but I think that's a different discussion.

Please do share. Preferably without the obfuscation.

I actually have some good build pics and screen grabs of testing....but I'm at a loss as to how to post pics on here. Lil help? Anyone?

Code:

[img]imageurl.jpg[/img]

I think you are missing a major point, which is probably my fault - The concept is that this (or a future version of something like it that doesn't use water cooling technology) replaces the furnace (separate gas / oil input), water heater tank (separate gas / electrical input), or AC unit (electrical input). All of those things bring in energy for the sole purpose of doing one thing - heating, cooling, whatever. We are talking about having energy coming in to do multiple tasks at once....Combining heating needs and computation. When you couple something like this with say, solar and battery storage technology, it can get real interesting.  The idea is to reduce the number of energy inputs and increase (or at the very least maintain) the productive outputs.

re: data centers:

They pull a TON of juice dude just to keep them going. You know what else they pull juice for (on a separate input?). Cooling. It's constant and it's REALLY expensive. Do I have to get into the principles of thermodynamics for the cooling part on this? As long as we can produce the heat onsite within a certain range (and also depending on the system type), we can cool the stacks without drawing a separate load to do the same thing. Also, the remaining waste heat can be used to heat the building, water tanks, etc.

Stand by on the pics - sorry you have to hold my hand here - do I have to have an image hosting serve?

[ltorsini]

This....is nothing like what we are doing.

Did you visit our site? Or are you knee jerking it?

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?

Hey there, no one is asking you to buy anything and, as a matter of fact, your reaction is exactly what we were hoping to elicit.  This isn't a scam, its a working device that heated my 1100sf apartment over the New York winter while it was mining Doge and folding for Stanford during testing.  

As for the technical questions, here's a shot: what will it do when the room is heated, it'll heat water for your shower, what will it do when the room and your water is heated, it'll run your refrigerator.  What will it do when your water is heated, your refrigerator is cold and the house is too hot - it'll regenerate (heat) a desiccant air conditioning system and cools the house.  

The whole point of this test bed is to test.  The current unit makes a solid 180F in the heating loop (today) with off the shelf parts - you are right a 25$ fan is a better idea for cooling... but were not cooling... this thing is built to make heat.  The economic model - your a whiz, maybe this will make sense: instead of spending 60% of the energy bill in a data center somewhere cooling the machines think about moving the machines to where there is a need for heat.  When we do this the heat you needed (wherever that is) is made by computation... not electric resistance heat (the link to the friction heater which is the exact mechanical equivalent of a resistance heater found in most electric water heaters today or the space heater you sit on the floor to keep your feet warm - which is pretty Rube Goldberg if you ask me) not burning gas and not running a compressor to pump the heat from outside your house to the inside of your house or vice versa when cooling.  

The cool (figuratively speaking) part is, now you aren't paying an gas/electric bill (or a portion at least) just to heat your house/water/etc, you are using electricity and computation to make that heat.  And, in a bit coin forum, I would assume you all know that you can make money on the computation that is being created for virtually the same energy spend you were using to heat water/air/etc.  

Do you think this might extend the payback of the mining rig a bit when you offset the roughly 3k a year the average residence spends a year to heat or cool water/space in your house?  Do you think it makes even more sense since you are no longer running the AC to cool the miner... like the data centers do 24/7?  There is a pony in there... think it over.  Talk about an absurd idea, sticking a miner in your house and turning on the AC to keep it cool was one of the most absurd ideas of all - yet how many people were doing that last year?

How do I keep it alive at those temps?  Not only do I keep it alive it runs like a champ at those temps, never misses a beat... well, it took a couple years of development to get it to those temps with off the shelf parts.  Give me a compelling reason and I just might tell.


https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Vrt-wU3oyExwpz3abH_nTnghoLfnaX3T4IFG66qtfA=w317-h207-p-no

[cloverme]

This is probably more suited for the Project development board. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=12.0

This is probably more of a solution for a cold climate area that needs these kinds of solutions. It needs to be cheaper than propane though as well as used in an area where electricity is cheap. Running my hot water heater costs $12 a month, so not exactly worth it for me. Interesting concept though, good luck taking it forward.

Oh yeah, watch the fumes coming off of your plastic. Heating plastic can be really and circulating water in it will cause leeching of the chemicals into the water.  Check out this link on how to identify which plastics to avoid:
http://io9.com/how-to-recognize-the-plastics-that-are-hazardous-to-you-461587850

[jimmothy]

Hey there, no one is asking you to buy anything and, as a matter of fact, your reaction is exactly what we were hoping to elicit.  This isn't a scam, its a working device that heated my 1100sf apartment over the New York winter while it was mining Doge and folding for Stanford during testing.

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

As for the technical questions, here's a shot: what will it do when the room is heated, it'll heat water for your shower, what will it do when the room and your water is heated, it'll run your refrigerator.  What will it do when your water is heated, your refrigerator is cold and the house is too hot - it'll regenerate (heat) a desiccant air conditioning system and cools the house.  

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.

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

The economic model - your a whiz, maybe this will make sense: instead of spending 60% of the energy bill in a data center somewhere cooling the machines think about moving the machines to where there is a need for heat

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?

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

The cool (figuratively speaking) part is, now you aren't paying an gas/electric bill (or a portion at least) just to heat your house/water/etc

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.

Do you think this might extend the payback of the mining rig a bit when you offset the roughly 3k a year the average residence spends a year to heat or cool water/space in your house?  Do you think it makes even more sense since you are no longer running the AC to cool the miner... like the data centers do 24/7?  There is a pony in there... think it over.  Talk about an absurd idea, sticking a miner in your house and turning on the AC to keep it cool was one of the most absurd ideas of all - yet how many people were doing that last year?

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?

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.

[jimmothy]

They pull a TON of juice dude just to keep them going. You know what else they pull juice for (on a separate input?). Cooling. It's constant and it's REALLY expensive. Do I have to get into the principles of thermodynamics for the cooling part on this? As long as we can produce the heat onsite within a certain range (and also depending on the system type), we can cool the stacks without drawing a separate load to do the same thing. Also, the remaining waste heat can be used to heat the building, water tanks, etc.

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.

[ltorsini]

Hey there, no one is asking you to buy anything and, as a matter of fact, your reaction is exactly what we were hoping to elicit.  This isn't a scam, its a working device that heated my 1100sf apartment over the New York winter while it was mining Doge and folding for Stanford during testing.

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.

As for the technical questions, here's a shot: what will it do when the room is heated, it'll heat water for your shower, what will it do when the room and your water is heated, it'll run your refrigerator.  What will it do when your water is heated, your refrigerator is cold and the house is too hot - it'll regenerate (heat) a desiccant air conditioning system and cools the house.  

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.

The economic model - your a whiz, maybe this will make sense: instead of spending 60% of the energy bill in a data center somewhere cooling the machines think about moving the machines to where there is a need for heat

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 cool (figuratively speaking) part is, now you aren't paying an gas/electric bill (or a portion at least) just to heat your house/water/etc

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.

Do you think this might extend the payback of the mining rig a bit when you offset the roughly 3k a year the average residence spends a year to heat or cool water/space in your house?  Do you think it makes even more sense since you are no longer running the AC to cool the miner... like the data centers do 24/7?  There is a pony in there... think it over.  Talk about an absurd idea, sticking a miner in your house and turning on the AC to keep it cool was one of the most absurd ideas of all - yet how many people were doing that last year?

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.

[ltorsini]

They pull a TON of juice dude just to keep them going. You know what else they pull juice for (on a separate input?). Cooling. It's constant and it's REALLY expensive. Do I have to get into the principles of thermodynamics for the cooling part on this? As long as we can produce the heat onsite within a certain range (and also depending on the system type), we can cool the stacks without drawing a separate load to do the same thing. Also, the remaining waste heat can be used to heat the building, water tanks, etc.

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.

Actually several multi billion dollar corporations build absorptive refrigeration plants every single day.  The majority of high rise buildings in every major city use absorptive chiller plants for cooling.  Absorption cooling was invented by the French scientist Ferdinand Carré in 1858 and predates the direct expansion refrigeration systems you are familiar with by a long shot.  We havent developed any new technology (yet) we're using existing technology to do something new and novel.  This really isn't rocket surgery... its more like shade tree mechanics.

[jimmothy]

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. 

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

**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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

They pull a TON of juice dude just to keep them going. You know what else they pull juice for (on a separate input?). Cooling. It's constant and it's REALLY expensive. Do I have to get into the principles of thermodynamics for the cooling part on this? As long as we can produce the heat onsite within a certain range (and also depending on the system type), we can cool the stacks without drawing a separate load to do the same thing. Also, the remaining waste heat can be used to heat the building, water tanks, etc.

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.

Actually several multi billion dollar corporations build absorptive refrigeration plants every single day.  The majority of high rise buildings in every major city use absorptive chiller plants for cooling.  Absorption cooling was invented by the French scientist Ferdinand Carré in 1858 and predates the direct expansion refrigeration systems you are familiar with by a long shot.  We havent developed any new technology (yet) we're using existing technology to do something new and novel.  This really isn't rocket surgery... its more like shade tree mechanics.

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

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.

[Nagle]

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.

[mwizard]

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.

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.    

[ltorsini]

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.  

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.

**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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

They pull a TON of juice dude just to keep them going. You know what else they pull juice for (on a separate input?). Cooling. It's constant and it's REALLY expensive. Do I have to get into the principles of thermodynamics for the cooling part on this? As long as we can produce the heat onsite within a certain range (and also depending on the system type), we can cool the stacks without drawing a separate load to do the same thing. Also, the remaining waste heat can be used to heat the building, water tanks, etc.

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.

Actually several multi billion dollar corporations build absorptive refrigeration plants every single day.  The majority of high rise buildings in every major city use absorptive chiller plants for cooling.  Absorption cooling was invented by the French scientist Ferdinand Carré in 1858 and predates the direct expansion refrigeration systems you are familiar with by a long shot.  We havent developed any new technology (yet) we're using existing technology to do something new and novel.  This really isn't rocket surgery... its more like shade tree mechanics.

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!