In the Future, the Internet Will Heat Your House - NY Times

.... tens of thousands of power-gobbling servers. Concentrated in one place, the servers produce enormous heat. The additional power needed for cooling them — up to half of the power used to run them — is the steep environmental price we have paid to move data to the so-called cloud.

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Nick Iluzada

Researchers, however, have come up with an intriguing option for that wasted heat: putting it to good use in people’s homes.

Two researchers at the University of Virginia and four at Microsoft Research explored this possibility in a paper presented this year at the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing. The paper looks at how the servers — though still operated by their companies — could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the “data furnace.”

...in the coldest climate, about 110 motherboards could keep a home as toasty as a conventional furnace does.

The rest of the year, the servers would still run, but the heat generated would be vented to the outside, as harmless as a clothes dryer’s...

Read on at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/business/data-furnaces-could-bring-heat-to-homes.html

HAASE- Obviously, I think this heat should be used as electricity and year around hot water ...