Given that the use of waste heat from data servers domestically and on a bigger scale seems to be a coming thing, simply using the waste heat to provide heat isn’t perhaps the most efficient way of heating.
Combining data servers with Stirling engine driven heat pumps would theoretically substantially improve things. Anyone know if this is being tested or if it’s doable?
Tim
A couple of links I should have included.
Yes there was an item in am online magazine saying this was being trailed but the biggest problem was actually putting the servers close to buildings and having secure data lines etc, to make them of use as cloud storage etc. Brian
I was interested in a gas powered heat pump, as I thought it would be more efficient than my gas CH boiler. There is an Italian company that makes them, although they are fairly expensive.
There is even a govt white paper backing them as an interim measure to reduce CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, the minister overruled his advisers. Fancy that!
Anyway, I just stuck in a new bog standard boiler. Next door has just installed a GSHP, including four boreholes going down 100m or so.
The essence of the greater than unity CoP (Coefficient of Performance) of heat pumps is that you are converting "high grade" (low entropy) energy, such as mechanical or electrical, to "low grade" (high entropy) energy, i.e. heat. Since gas contains only (potential) low grade energy, I don't see how a heat pump can be gas powered.
You've never heard of gas fridges, then.
Or air conditioners in cars powered by LPG.
I think there's a reason why most fridges are electrical rather than gas, and the same would apply to heatpumps, and that reason would be efficiency.
Although I wonder how end-to-end efficiency would compare with a gas boiler: Would a gas powered heat pump get you a COP of better than 1? Would it do better in efficiency than an electric heat pump powered by a CCGT?
Of course a gas heat pump is not able to take advantage of renewable electricity, which an electric one is. So it doesn't actually reduce your CO2 output very much.
Theo
That's not a valid comparison.
An LPG powered car runs its aircon on mechanical energy.
A gas fridge doesn't - see
Andy
Thass gonna be well below the water table, Shirley?
What does that matter? All you are after if the higher temperature of underground. A borehole full of water will couple the heat pipes to the ground better than a borehole full of air will.
What about something that is pumped through the pipes contaminates the source of your drinking water in 10 years time as the pipes rust or degrade.
Yes
Probably not.
And ? Water is a good conductor. Even if he turns it to ice its still not bad.
They are plastic, and contain nothing toxic IIRC
One burns the gas to drive the heat cycle directly, the other burns the gas in an ICE to run a mechanical compressor.
They are different, but there's no reason why you couldn't use a small ICE in a heatpump if there was a good reason to do that.
I can't think of a good reason over an electrically driven compressor, but maybe there's a niche somewhere.
Theo
Everyone seems to be missing the point that I was asking about, namely using waste heat supplied by a data server to drive a domestic heat pump. Has this been done?
Obviously gas fridges used heat to pump heat but could this be scaled up? Alternatively the waste heat could drive a Stirling engine to run a compressor but maybe this would be too inefficient?
Tim
Without doing the math: I don't think there would be an advantage to that. There might be if one could take a high temperature source to run, say, a Stirling engine to move lots of heat across a small temperature difference using a heat pump.
However, I expect that data center waste heat is not very hot to begin with, so it's probably more efficient to just use your domestic radiator or tank of water as a heat sink...
(The math for the maximum possible efficiency of a thermodynamic engine is called the Carnot cycle, and depends only on the input and output temperatures.)
Thomas Prufer
The waste heat is fairly low grade, stirling engines are mostly suited for driving sipping emus rather than heating systems. If you search for powerful stirling engines, they need hundreds of degree inputs (which you're not going to get from a server) and are the size of a large shed for 25kW.
A lllooonnnggg time ago I used a kerosene powered fridge for 2 years. We had no mains power - rural west africa. We spent quite a lot of time keeping the wick in order, so it worked well.
I quick google shows they are still a "thing".
Showers where you took a pint of kerosene into the cubicle with you, poured it into a gizmo on the plumbing, lit the wick, tweaked the airflow, enjoyed a warmish shower were fun in Lesotho.
Mike
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