819
Peak homelabbing
(lemmy.world)
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
My server is a loose motherboard with a loose PSU, thrown into the living room TV rack, which I leave open for cooling. It's a repurposed (free) Athlon, DDR2. I only use it for smb and git backups, and project sharing between my desktop and laptop. What amazes me most is my IT coworkers don't find that a perfectly acceptable scenario.
That free computer is going to cost you a lot on your electric bill.
Not really, electricity is pretty cheap when you live right beside the largest hydro plant in South America.
Not in winter it won't.
Even in winter, it's terrible compared to a heat pump or (probably) directly burning gas or wood.
Not how heat works.
If you're trying to heat your home, every electronic device becomes 100% efficient. All its "waste" heat becomes wanted heat. That it might only be 40W of heat is not the point.
Heat pumps can actually be over 100% efficient if you’re measuring it based on heat produced. Because heat pumps aren’t designed to produce heat; They’re designed to move it around via refrigerant. And if you can use 1w of energy to soak up and bring in 3w of heat, you’re now 300% efficient.
So by that metric, a server would be a “bad” heater. It would still contribute to your heating, but not as much as a heat pump would. It doesn’t mean the device is below 100% efficient, it just means the bar for “good” heaters is much higher than 100%.
Every electronic device is 100% efficient after the electricity has already been generated and delivered, sure, but a bunch of efficiency losses occurred before that. If you're comparing methane burned on-site in a furnace to methane burned at a power plant, transmitted to the site as electricity, and then used for electric resistance heating, burning on-site is gonna be better even if the furnace loses more heat up the chimney than the power plant does.
Also, a heat pump is "300%-500% efficient" in the sense that it moves 3x-5x as much heat as it uses. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance