These servers want to heat your house ... for free

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  • The next wave in home heat: Data furnaces

    The next wave in home heat: Data furnaces

    It may not look like much, but that white box beneath entrepreneur Boaz Leupe could be the future of home heating.

    And it's free. If you haven't heard of Dutch start-up Nerdalize, the company that wants to use its cloud servers to heat your house, you may soon enough ...

    Photo by: Nerdalize

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • A piece of a data center in your home

    A piece of a data center in your home

    Earlier this year, sustainable energy company Eneco delivered five Nerdalize data furnaces to volunteer homes in the Netherlands as a test study.

    If successful, the tech could aid mankind's long, dirty quest for warmth ... and the tech world's long, sweaty battle against data center overheating.

    Photo by: Nerdalize

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • Canning heat

    Canning heat

    The logic is simple: Data centers, and the machines inside of them, get hot. Like, really hot.

    In fact, companies ranging from Wikipedia to Microsoft have suffered from data center outages in recent years, spurred by too much heat in too close of a space.

    Photo by: Justin Mott/Corbis

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • Got racks?

    Got racks?

    Currently, most data centers spend a lot of money on cooling options, starting with racks that keep the number-crunching computers apart.

    Photo by: iStock

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • Costly cooling

    Costly cooling

    In fact, even as some states experience severe droughts, many data centers use water systems to cool their servers.

    Even a mid-size data center is estimated to need 130 million gallons of water per year-about what you'd need for 100 acres of almond trees or three hospital buildings.

    Photo by: Aimee Chanthadavong/ZDNet

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • Home as data center

    Home as data center

    In contrast, the Nerdalize concept involves essentially breaking up a data center and spreading it out into a network of volunteer homes.

    Photo by: Nerdalize

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • Remote possibilities

    Remote possibilities

    The possibilities for conservation are intriguing, and not just for folks interested in water conservation.

    In some parts of the world, people still rely on wood furnaces. That includes this Croatian farmer, photographed with his wood-burning furnace in 2012.

    Photo by: Romulic-Stojcic/Corbis

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • Perfect for an apartment?

    Perfect for an apartment?

    As for exactly how much data furnace heat we're talking about: Each Nerdalize unit puts out about 1000 watts of heat. That may not sound like much, especially in the dead of winter. But consider ...

    Photo by: Nerdalize

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • How much energy are you using?

    How much energy are you using?

    Many portable electric heaters offer roughly the same, or perhaps a little more, warmth, with a maximum of about 1,500 watts.

    And they aren't helping to cool down a data center by breaking up the workload.

    Photo by: iStock

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • A larger trend

    A larger trend

    That said, Nerdalize isn't the only company looking for environmentally-friendly ways to cool down data centers.

    In 2011, Google built a data center in Finland that uses cold sea water for cooling. And in 2008, IBM built a data center in Zurich that used excess heat to warm a nearby swimming pool.

    Photo by: Google/ZDNet

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • The next best thing to solar?

    The next best thing to solar?

    Nerdalize also isn't the only entity hoping to make heat less costly to the environment.

    Solar tech is also heating up. This building near Odeillo-Via, France, is a solar furnace. It uses an array of plane mirrors to gather rays of light from the sun, reflecting them on to a larger, curved mirror.

    The rays are then focused onto an area the size of a cooking pot and can reach nearly 5,500 degrees.

    Photo by: Pierre Merimee/Corbis

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • How Nerdalize works

    How Nerdalize works

    In comparison, Nerdalize is starting small, but it hopes to know more about the viability of its data furnace business model by the end of the year.

    The server inside a Nerdalize box is called the eRadiator, and it's built to be attached to a wall.

    Unlike conventional heaters, it's silent.

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • Slow burn

    Slow burn

    It takes about an hour for the data furnace to heat up.

    In the meantime, the system inside the box is crunching data for Nerdalize clients in life sciences, geocomputing, and video and image rendering.

    Photo by: Nerdalize

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • No Internet, big problem

    No Internet, big problem

    If you're thinking that this might be a good solution for you, one warning: You do need to keep your home Internet service active if you want the heat to stay on.

    Photo by: Nerdalize

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

  • High temps, lower prices

    High temps, lower prices

    According to Eneco, a study by the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computing Science shows that the cost of data center cooling could drop 30 percent to 55 percent using the Nerdalize business model.

    Photo by: ZDNet/File

    Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

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Canning heat

The logic is simple: Data centers, and the machines inside of them, get hot. Like, really hot.

In fact, companies ranging from Wikipedia to Microsoft have suffered from data center outages in recent years, spurred by too much heat in too close of a space.

Caption by: Leslie Gornstein

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