News University of Leeds trials total immersion cooling

"Imagine having your PC or TV plumbed into the central heating system."
Yeah! instead of all that wasted heat energy being pushed out into my room, i could have it connected to my radiator to push the heat out into my room. Genius!

 

This is actually something I have thought about after noticing how warm the computer labs got when I was in college. Basically if there was a way to recover that heat and distribute it around the campus. The solution provided here looks good.

You are thinking on too small a scale, just your own computer in your own room. But if you have massive amounts of computers or a server farm, finding a way to recover the waste heat energy could save a lot money. In fact money is spent trying to keept these kinds of rooms cool. You obviously don't want an entire server farm just heating the building within which they are kept, you want it moved out of that building and heating other rooms such as offices, labs etc. This would be even better if there was a way to store the heat energy and then access it when required.

 

"there is no reason why every home shouldn't make better use of the surplus heat from consumer electronics"

Iceotope are the ones thinking on the small scale. Large sure, consumer, lol good luck getting intelligent people to pay for zero energy gain.

 

So basically, this is like using flurinert or whatever, connected to a heat exchanger, attached to a bong cooler ?

 

Nice idea... but unfeasible.

What do you do if a component expires? Take a whole rack offline pumping the coolant somewhere, waiting ages?

 

So we all go cloud computing and pay our heating-bills to the server farm-holders instead?

 

Ok. Well that adds up.

I'd like to see that... surely pretty over engineered. How does routing cables between modules work? I guess you plug into the module, and the module has an external interface and internal interface to act as a go between for ethernet and fibre connections?

Edit: Air-con can be really expensive, and can still fail and require redundancy. So I can see many appeals. Although I wonder about the redundancy here... extra pumps easy enough, sure... but you'd need redundant plumbing also... also easy enough... but potentially expensive

 

Ok... so each server is independent entirely and I presume of Iceotope's own design although using standard hardware. (Their own case so to speak that can plug into their cooling system / proprietary rack.)

I did vaguely remember reading the article you link to above.

Pretty cool. Loads of potential though. Here for instance, it's cold in the winter in the office and the aircon is always being fixed, so plumbing in radiators on the cold months and switching over to another loop in the summer that goes under the building or anywhere out of direct sunlight.

 

A colleague of mine used to work in an office where the waste heat from the universities servers was pumped into the building to cut down on the heating, they apparently sat with the windows open all year it was so warm.

 

These will most likely be connected to both some free air cooler(s) and traditional air-con units. The free air coolers are like giant radiators with a couple of big fans on top and use little electricity to cool the coolant down, the only draw back is that they only work in a fixed thermal window. Too cold or too hot and they have to run the coolant via the traditional aircon units.

We had one in my previous employers recent DC. They are pretty cool bits of kit. From memory there was never a single failure in the 2.5 years I was working from that site and I'm not sure if there have been any in the 14 months since I left either.

 

Have you ever thought about the MESS this makes when you have to service one of those immersed servers? Or what happens to HDDs if you immerse them into liquid?

 

Heat recovery ventilation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_ventilation

Just pipe the heat to where its needed
Will eventually be used in all new homes

 

The HDD's would have to be in a separate rack as they don't run full of fluid.

 

to be fair, building designers already take into account the number of computers when they design heat/AC systems. In the winter a significant portion of the heat for a building can come from a server farm.

 

We have Novac in stock here and its £170 a ltr for the best stuff they make and £120 for the cheapest stuff they have. And it isn't that good. Its all so in no way as good at removing heat as there older fluids and still no ware near as good as water no matter what leeds uni say.