In The Netherlands is it possible to heat water with a computer. Well, let’s better explain it, heating water using the waste heat from servers. We’ve talked about it already in a previous article a few weeks ago, and we are pleased to go more in depth in this interesting project: the innovative idea comes from the start up Nerdalize, and consists in the recovery of the waste heat produced by a distributed network of servers, installed at homes, employed to produce hot tap water. Servers in traditional datacenters consume a lot of energy and produce a lot of waste heat, requiring the 40% of the electricity consumed for server’s cooling.

The Nerdalize solution optimizes in a smart way the energy consumption, and the company built its own heating device that integrates the computer servers in it, able to manage the heat exchange from the servers to hot water. The system is called CloudBox and comes with a boiler tank, and is an add-on easy to install in existing central heating systems. Installation is handled by the company, which also pays the energy used by the servers.

The Nerdalize servers heat water at 55°, drastically reducing gas use. The same electricity is used for computing power and heating, increasing energy saving and efficiency and decreasing CO2 emissions. The technologies employed are open source, ensuring a transparent service to end-users, and flexibility thanks to the possibility to scale from 1 to thousands of high-performance vCPUs.

Further details and informations can be found by contacting Maaike Stoops: m.stoops@nerdalize.com.