So I have this silly idea/longterm project of wanting to run a server on renewables on my farm. And I would like to reuse the heat generated by the server, for example to heat a grow room, or simply my house. How much heat does a server produce, and where would you consider it best applied? Has anyone built such a thing?
I wonder how to take on the efficiency question when considering waste heat. Would and older model generating more heat be the better choice? Has anybody started to dig into the complexities of calculating efficiency for circular systems?
There’s no real complexity. Computers are first and foremost electric space heaters, a negligible amount of energy is used to perform computation.
If you would be heating a room with resistive electric heating, a computer drawing the same wattage can do the same job while also, in theory, doing some useful work.
If you are just evaluating heating options, heat pumps use less energy to output the same heat.