this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
193 points (95.3% liked)
Technology
59347 readers
6293 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Heat pumps are great, but what this guy is saying is wrong. Generating heat in the thing you're trying to cool won't help save any money no matter the technology.
Let's say you were deliberately trying to heat something and cool something else, like a water heater and your home. Then heat pumps are doubly effective. Maybe that's where the confusion in this comment stems from, but that's not what's going on with a data center.
I should have been more specific, the savings would be from compartmentalizing the hot room from the rest of the HVAC system.
If you partition the lab from the rest of the hvac system and install a heat pump for the lab, it would drastically reduce the amount of heated air the HVAC system has to cool and move around the rest of the home.
So you're saying to just let the servers get as hot as they want and ignore it? What is this heat pump going to be heating?
If you don't have anything you are wanting to heat up, adding a heat pump doesn't help.
Modern heat pump systems are reversible, so you would be drawing the heat energy from the room and releasing it outside. During this exchange air is run over a compressed coolant which cools the air and reintroduces it back to the room.
That's just called an air conditioner?
An AC can only cool the home, while a heat pump can both cool and heat a home. They are different things, and worth looking into.
That's just an air conditioner. The difference between an air conditoner and a heat pump is that a heat pump has a reversal valve that allows the refrigerant to run backwards through the system.
My point is someone is using a whole bunch of words to say "I'd air-condition my server room". It's not exactly a ground breaking idea.
A heat pump still costs energy to run... And running it in reverse to cool a room is the exact same process as running an ac to cool a room. It's all phase change cooling which we've been doing for decades. The only possible innovation that could be had here is using the waste heat instead of just releasing it to the outside environment, but that requires wanting to heat something else while you need to cool the server room.