How manny computers would it take to heat a house

[Pasi123]

I use computers to heat my room during winter. Folding with few GPUs is enough.

I live in Finland so we have quite cold winters

[Ryanwake]

15 minutes ago, mariushm said:

It's a silly question.

What's in the computer matters, what produces heat.

 

fans bring colder air from outside the case, the air is pushed through radiators and heatsinks and gets warmed (heat moves from metal fins and heatsinks into the air) and then the warmer air goes out the case.

Warm air rises, so the air closer to the top of your room would be warmer than the air at the bottom... that's why it may take a long time until you'd notice your room heating up from a single computer or something that consumes little power.

 

Sorry I didn't think I needed to explain the question in detail, because 1000 Watts far drives should produce the same heat as a thousand watt of gpus.

 

So I'll rephrase the question, how many watts of computers would it take to heat a small house in the winter. That way it could be scaled up if somebody had a bigger house.

 

And would it be better to crypto mine or set up cloud servers.

[Ryanwake]

Just now, Pasi123 said:

I use computers to heat my room during winter. Folding with few GPUs is enough.

I live in Finland so we have quite cold winters

I saw a South African YouTuber, they don't have an insulation standard there so he used a room heater to heat his room during the winter. 

 

Eventually he replaced is 500 watt room heater with a 500 w computer and it did the trick plus made money overnight.

 

I'll admit that somewhat inspired this

[jones177]

My computers did heat my apartment for years. I was a freelance 3d artist and had multiple computers rendering overnight. I also live in Florida so the winters only go down to the 40s f so it was not that had to do. 

 

Now my computers only blow cool are so they are only good for night lights with their RGB. 

[Spindel]

In my country (Sweden) you would say an average (not newly constructed) apartment building needs 40-60 W/m² for heating at -18°C outside and 21°C inside. But in general there is a wide range for residential buildings from about 7-10 W/m² up to 200 W/m², size, shape and age all play a big factor. 

 

Just do the math from there. 

 

The caveat is that this heating demand is true for said outside temperature. If it's warmer you need less heating power and thus most radiators are equipped with a thermostat. 

[Tristerin]

On 4/25/2021 at 2:02 PM, Lurick said:

How about a FX 9590 and 4 Fury X GPUs?

I have almost this setup...can OC the FX 8350 to 9590 bios specs and it gets way to hot lol (240mm aio cant cool it) and 3x Fury X's lol....When folding/mining with just 2 Fury's in a room it raises the temp QUITE a bit.  

[WkdPaul]

On 4/25/2021 at 3:01 PM, ImAlsoRan said:

Depends what you call "heating a house". Any normal PC could lift the ambient temperature a 1-2 degrees, but only a small range (1-2 inches).

That's not how physics work, at all. A PC outputting constant heat WILL warm up a whole room, heat doesn't just 'disappear'.

 

 

 

@Ryanwake

 

I mine in winter instead of using regular heating in my office (in my province, it's all renewables or green production ; hydro, wind, and nuclear) and it's cheap (CAD $0.08 / kwh ... so around USD $0.065 / kwh).

 

My electricity bill is roughly the same, but this winter (around 6 months) I made around $300 CAD mining with only a 1060 3GB and a R9 290x. those 2 GPUs were enough to heat up my office and the room beside. I lowered the regular heating for those 2 rooms to 10°c just in case the PCs crashed or stopped mining for some reason.

 

So, from experience, a constant (meaning 24h) 200-300w "heat output" should be enough to warm up a room above 15°c in an insulated home, maybe even less (both PC are using just above 500W and are enough to heat 2 rooms ... technically 3 if you count the bathroom as it has no heating in it)

[LAwLz]

The question is very flawed since we don't have nearly enough info to work with.

1) How big is the house? That matters A LOT.

2) How much do you need it to heat up? Heating up a room from 10 degrees to 20 degrees requires hell of a lot more energy than heating something from 18 to 20 degrees.

3) What computers are we talking about?

 

 

A computer is basically just a space heater. 99.9% of the energy used by your setup will end up as heat energy.

Heating is often expressed in BTU so let's convert watts to BTU first to make things a bit simpler. 1 BTU is roughly 0.29 watts.

I'd say about 1000 square foot is what I'd consider a "small house" but I guess that depends on where you live, but let's go with that.

 

 

The rule of thumb is that to heat 1000 square feet you want something like 16,000 BTU.

 

16000 * 0.29 = 4640 watts.

 

If we assume your average desktop PC, with monitor and stuff, uses an average of 200 watts (it idles a lot of the time) then we need:

4640 / 200 = ~23 desktops to heat a house.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

It's important to add that in your home just about every form of electronic is also a space heater.  Your TV, your computers, your Xbox, your lightbulbs, the fridge, all of it, these produce heat at nearly 99.9% efficiency.  Yes, even the light from your lightbulbs and radio waves off your wifi radio, is largely absorbed by your walls where it becomes heat (Obviously some of that escapes the building)  Unless a device is venting heat outdoors, like a clothes dryer or an air conditioner, nearly every watt your home consumes is heating it.  This is also why in the summer, when running your air conditioner, you'll want to minimize any electronics you don't need, they're just adding heat that the AC has to work against.

 

And for a select few in this thread, all I have is this:

[heli1337]

Overclocked Phenom II X6 1100T combined with GTX 295 on 4x SLI will be great for getting all house warm.

[thrasher_565]

On 4/25/2021 at 12:10 PM, Den-Fi said:

 

Reminds me of the people that constantly ask if this = sub-ambient temps lol.

 

bro what you taking about your temps cant go lower then ambient....thow people...

[thrasher_565]

On 4/25/2021 at 12:34 PM, Ryanwake said:

Sorry I didn't think I needed to explain the question in detail, because 1000 Watts far drives should produce the same heat as a thousand watt of gpus.

 

So I'll rephrase the question, how many watts of computers would it take to heat a small house in the winter. That way it could be scaled up if somebody had a bigger house.

 

And would it be better to crypto mine or set up cloud servers.

well gaming,mining,rendering anything that uses the cpu or gpu will use more power then idel so...ya you will need to do something. but it inside the pc case gets too hot it will throttel down so it wont kill it self so you would have to disable it if you wanted more.... or you would have to have the pc in a room with cool air and pipe the hot air to other rooms...

 

i once lived in a small house about 2 bedrooms and had oil heat and i put $300 worth of oil in it and it didn't even last a moth so we went with out heat and just heated are rooms. you can do this with a pc vs a heater but it cost a hell of a lot more.

 

but rent was $300 a month so w/e

Edited May 2, 2021 by thrasher_565

[Guest]

27 minutes ago, thrasher_565 said:

bro what you taking about your temps cant go lower then ambient....thow people...

What?

[Godlygamer23]

39 minutes ago, thrasher_565 said:

bro what you taking about your temps cant go lower then ambient....thow people...

They definitely can. 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

1 minute ago, Godlygamer23 said:

They definitely can. 

I believe they mean that using air cooling (Including cooling your water cooling with air) can't go lower than room temperature.  You can't blow 20'C air at something and make it go 19'C.

[thrasher_565]

2 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

They definitely can. 

not on air they cant unless you ac or somthing

[Kredbu]

This very much depends on the house insulation quality, PC components and how the computer is being used. 

 

About 5 years ago when I lived in 2 bedroom detached house in northern quebec, my furnace failed in the dead of winter. At the time I had two gaming pcs. One was a core 2 q9450 with 2x 7950 in crossfire, and the other was an fx 8350 with 2x 280x on crossfire. 

 

Running folding@ home on both kept the temp at about +12 degrees celsius, when outside temp was about 30 below freezing. Which was thankfully good enough to keep the pipes from freezing while waiting for a furnace part for about a week.

 

But that house was very well insulated, with spray foam insulation between studs and styrofoam sheeting under the siding. YMMV depending on your pc, house size and insulation quality.

[8tg]

Small space heaters are 6-7000k BTUs, or about 1600-1700 watts of electrical heat dissipation. This is a very rough comparison, but youd need effectively 4 R9 295x2's running in one system plus an FX 9590 overclocked to manage to get that kind of straight heat output, because despite that wattage being close to 2300 watts, it wouldnt actually make 2300 watts of heat, but closer to that 1600 watt mark.

And thats one space heater, youd need one for each major room, so several PC's with obscene dual power supply setups running the hottest hardware AMD ever made, that would heat your home.

[NineEyeRon]

Mine heats up my room to the point I have to open a window after some serious gaming. I guess it raises the room temp 2-3 degrees.

[Mark Kaine]

Generally one for each room and you're good to go!

[akio123008]

I see quite a few people are underestimating the amount of power it takes to heat a whole house (unless you live in some pretty warm place). I'd say you need at least 5kW, if not 10 to do it on an older house.

[da na]

In my case, one.

Dual 135 watt Xeons can produce a hell of a lot of heat doing a C4D render...

[WkdPaul]

On 5/3/2021 at 5:53 AM, 8tg said:

Small space heaters are 6-7000k BTUs, or about 1600-1700 watts of electrical heat dissipation. This is a very rough comparison, but youd need effectively 4 R9 295x2's running in one system plus an FX 9590 overclocked to manage to get that kind of straight heat output, because despite that wattage being close to 2300 watts, it wouldnt actually make 2300 watts of heat, but closer to that 1600 watt mark.

And thats one space heater, youd need one for each major room, so several PC's with obscene dual power supply setups running the hottest hardware AMD ever made, that would heat your home.

 

That's not taking into account that space heaters don't run 24/7, a space heater has high wattage because it's made to raise the temperature as fast as possible, and will only run intermittently.

 

PC(s) that can generate 500-600w 24/7 can achieve similar results as high wattage space heater ... source ; I use mining to keep myself warm during the Canadian winters months, I have 2 PCs mining that generate around 500w 24/7, they warm up 2 rooms and keep the ambient temperature at about 15-16°c, I get higher temperature in my office by simply closing the door. This replaces the roughly 2000w baseboard heaters (could be more, didn't check the watts on those baseboards, but from experience I have what seems to be 2x 1000w, and 1x 750w for those rooms) but they would only run intermittently. From my electricity bill, it's roughly the same in cost (it's hard to calculate since there are day-to-day and months-to-months variations, I would have to make very controlled test to see).