Quote from: jimmothy on September 10, 2014, 04:35:45 AM

Quote from: ltorsini on September 09, 2014, 11:24:32 PM

Hey there, no one is asking you to buy anything and, as a matter of fact, your reaction is exactly what we were hoping to elicit. This isn't a scam, its a working device that heated my 1100sf apartment over the New York winter while it was mining Doge and folding for Stanford during testing.

This is a scam in the same way solar roadways is a scam. It is a neat idea that doesn't make sense economically.

**Not really. Its been reviewed by several PhDs - in fact our senior scientist has his doctorate. There is a very sensible and viable business model to this, I'm sure you can come up with it if you spend a minute or two.

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As for the technical questions, here's a shot: what will it do when the room is heated, it'll heat water for your shower, what will it do when the room and your water is heated, it'll run your refrigerator. What will it do when your water is heated, your refrigerator is cold and the house is too hot - it'll regenerate (heat) a desiccant air conditioning system and cools the house.

How much do you expect a modified refrigerator/air conditioner would cost/save? I really doubt you will recycle enough energy to justify the costs whatever they may be.

**The refrigerators are mass produced today - every RV, most boats and many, many off grid homes already use absorptive refrigeration... it is safe, economical and completely silent. When you take into account that your refrigerator is the device that runs the most in your house, you'll likely rethink that last statement.

You might be able to save a few hundred dollars if you heated your water tank for a year using an asic, but your contraption cost would probably negate those savings. Not many people mine for more than a few months and those who do have very low electricity costs which makes recycling pointless.

**The energy you recovered alone would likely reimburse the cost of the system in under 3 years once they are in full production, remember you are using this energy already, we're just talking about using the same energy for two or more purposes - Heating/Cooling/Computation. If you take into account Moore's law we'll very likely have good reason to replace the units every 3-4 years, as computing gets smaller and more efficient we can pack more and more of it into the same appliance. I'm really not interested in heating water with ASIC - there is a much more robust business model in selling distributed computation that doesn't rely on a race to the bottom from a technology perspective.

The real savings would come from space heating but you don't need a rube goldberg machine for that.

**The savings can come from far more than space heating - take a look at the website and think about the energy balance of the house. We will eventually address more than 70% of the load in the average house through space heating, water heating, air conditioning and refrigeration. You don't have to be rube goldberg to see that.

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The economic model - your a whiz, maybe this will make sense: instead of spending 60% of the energy bill in a data center somewhere cooling the machines think about moving the machines to where there is a need for heat

Ignoring the fact that most modern datacenters use ~10-30% for cooling and that converting all their air cooled hardware to water cooled would cost an obscene amount of money, how do you plan on moving several hundred KW worth of heat from a datacenter to a place that needs it?

**Lets not ignore the fact that 'modern datacenters' make a very, very small portion of the overall population of datacenters which have been around since the 90s at scale. The vast majority of datacenters are embedded in office buildings and rely on the HVAC system or CRAC units for cooling... you can bet they are not using 10-30% total energy for cooling.

I don't doubt it can be done but I really doubt it can be done cost effectively.

**That's our job to figure out, not yours.

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The cool (figuratively speaking) part is, now you aren't paying an gas/electric bill (or a portion at least) just to heat your house/water/etc

The question is what portion? Have you done calculations on how much electricity you might be able to recycle? I'd love to see a cost/savings breakdown.

**We have - think along the lines of 70% to start with and then think about how many of the appliances that make up the remaining 30% could be completely obviated if you actually had a house with a super computer built into its core. We're not there... but we will get there.

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Do you think this might extend the payback of the mining rig a bit when you offset the roughly 3k a year the average residence spends a year to heat or cool water/space in your house? Do you think it makes even more sense since you are no longer running the AC to cool the miner... like the data centers do 24/7? There is a pony in there... think it over. Talk about an absurd idea, sticking a miner in your house and turning on the AC to keep it cool was one of the most absurd ideas of all - yet how many people were doing that last year?

But if 90% of that energy is spent on space heating, why not use a $25 heatsink+fan instead of a $300 rube goldberg machine and another ~$1000 for a modified AC+refrigerator?

**Only 40% at best is used for space heating with another 18% used for water heat. Of course we'll start there, its the easiest and most cost effective loads to get to in a house! But, if you are going to purpose build a house around a super computer why exactly wouldn't you install the $1000 refrigerator or the $2000 air conditioner? Remember, the more you use these computation powered devices the more computation that has to be done in order to create the heat... if we are selling the computation to Cloud Services Aggregators & Brokerages then that makes everyone happy.

Basically you can recycle ~$2700 without modifying your hardware by space heating, or you can spend an extra ~$300 to save $3000(~$300 extra) by incorporating water heating.

If you can do that we have some friends at NREL who would love to have a talk with you. Remember, computers aren't designed to run hot they are built to be run as cool as practicable (dont worry, NREL couldn't get their heads wrapped around the concept at first and they are ALL engineers and PhDs) and today's computers certainly aren't optimized to get to the 180-200f that we need to do refrigeration or air conditioning.

Thanks much for the good questions, we need to get prepped for these conversations as we start to roll out the prototypes.