UK Power Networks trials Thermify’s HeatHub boilers, swapping gas flames for clustered compute
Reusing heat from servers has gained momentum recent years, but UK Power Networks (UKPN) is taking an unusual approach: installing mini datacenters powered by Raspberry Pi hardware in customers homes to provide heating for families struggling with energy costs.
UKPN, which manages the “last mile” of cables and substations delivering electricity from the National Grid to customers in the South East of England, is piloting the project as part of its SHIELD (Smart Heat and Intelligent Energy in Low-income Districts) program.
This will equip participating households with solar and battery systems, while one-third will also receive the “HeatHub” system - a compact datacenter roughly the size of a large heat pump that replaces traditional gas boilers. […]
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electric heating is very efficient in the sense that it converts almost 100% of the electric energy into heat. But electricity is expensive.
I think the implied point of comparison is (edit: e.g.,) heat pumps, which are effectively more than 100% efficient (as mentioned elsewhere in the thread), making ~100% efficiency relatively inefficient by comparison.
You keep pointing this out, and it’s true that heat pumps are superior. But given the range of options for home heating I think “100%” is going to be among the most efficient.
For electric heating, you basically only have two options, heat pumps and resistive. Within just that comparison, 100% is the lower limit.
If you want to compare it to other types of heating, efficiency becomes much harder to measure, because the inputs can differ.
If you’re using electricity generated by burning fossil fuels it’s simple enough, but the “100% efficient” resistive heating loses again because you could just burn the same fossil fuels in your home to heat it directly which is much more efficient.
If you’re using renewable power, then “efficiency” kinda becomes meaningless because you’re using entirely different resources to produce the heat, so you can only try to abstract it by using either money or environmental impact per unit of heat as a stand-in. I don’t have the numbers on it right now so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think resistive heating would actually be more expensive than fossil-fuel based heating, generally speaking - there’s a reason that it’s not really a wide-spread thing for heating whole homes.
So unless I’m wrong on something here, resistive heating is really not going to be among the most efficient options, unless you specifically only look at environmental impact and are using regenerative sources for it. But even then, the heat pump just wins by miles.