Struggling to heat your home? How about 500 Raspberry Pi units? (2025)
theregister.com

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19 points

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cmsefton

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a day ago

17 comments

red369 ・ 20 hours ago

I've been cold in an office at work and ran a stress test on an old laptop which was destined for e-recycling, so that it would blow warm air on my hands.

It wasn't achieving anything doing that work, but it did work well. At least I think the office was cold from not being heated enough, as opposed to being over-cooled in summer. I really hope that was the case!

For some reason, I must have been using the laptop for another purpose too, and I got attached to it and requested that it be wiped and took it home and used it as a daily-driver for years. It was a silly blue Dell E4300, and had a very easily swappable HDD tray so I bought a few different trays/faceplates, and could dual-boot by swapping HDDs in seconds (it didn't really need the screw to hold the tray in place). Bad battery life, but the battery could be swapped in seconds too.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-Latitude-E4300.12612.0.ht...

out_of_protocol ・ 21 hours ago

If you don't use heat pump (which can have 300-500% efficiency), whatever you plug into a wall socket will produce heat at exactly 100%. So the real choice here is either monetize what you are doing with electricity or using a heat pump

  • acidtechno303 ・ 21 hours ago

    my friends have been heating their apartments in the winter mining cryptocurrencies. they're not into crypto, in that they don't do it in the summer, it just helps offset the cost in rentals without heat pumps -- gamers who've already purchased the gpus

jeffreygoesto ・ a day ago

You could also collect thrown away disposable vapes and pierce them with a nail. Heat for free...

1970-01-01 ・ a day ago

Still a much better idea than orbital data centers.

jcalvinowens ・ 20 hours ago

I use ~500W of Linux machines to heat a little office, it is perfectly sufficient for California winter.

msarrel ・ 15 hours ago

Reminds me of when I kept my apartment warm with Breaking Point and Ixia load generators testing hardware.

voidUpdate ・ a day ago

Given the current LLM-induced RAM prices, I think it would be cheaper to just pay for heating...

  • filcuk ・ a day ago

    Pure heating doesn't generate any work beside just heating. This is an interesting and a rather futuristic concept.

stonecharioteer ・ 19 hours ago

How do I cool my house though? I'm in India and need cheaper cooling.

  • bombcar ・ 17 hours ago

    Dig greedily and too deep (underground is usually cooler, though eventually temperatures will stabilize unless you have ground water circulation or something).